Performance Center console service hangs running Dashboard

Products

CA Infrastructure Management CA Performance Management - Usage and Administration CA Performance Management - Data Polling

Issue/Introduction

When running Dashboard reports the Performance Center (PC) caperfcenter_console service hangs. When this happens only a restart of that service will resolve the issue. This is most often seen for Dashboards that:

Contain Views that show both Events and Trend, Table or other graphical data
Run against large time frames greater than 30 days
Run against As-Polled or Hourly resolution

Cause

This is observed due to one of three possible causes.

A known defect, DE439284, where Views against more than 30 days that contain Events cause excess memory usage and hangs the console service.
Lack of sufficient memory resources on the server and/or configured for the console service.
A combination of 1 & 2.

Environment

Performance Management releases r3.7.6 and earlier

Resolution

This issue will be resolved via defect DE439284 in release r3.7.7. The Fixed Issues list for that release will show the following related to that defect.

Symptom: When rendering shade area on trend chart related to standard deviation the processing performance impacted memory resource usage.
Resolution: Address the processing performance impact when rendering shade area on trend chart related to standard deviation.

To resolve this we can take the following steps:

Upgrade to r3.7.7. If still observed, increase memory on PC server allocating the additional memory to the console service.
Disable the display of Events for Views on Dashboards run against time frames that extend past 30 days.
Set the Resolution to Hourly as the maximum depth. Best to use Daily or Weekly instead, then drill into more specific smaller time frames to see the Hourly or As-Polled data.
If the deeper resolutions are required, may need to add additional memory to to the PC server, allocating it to the PC console service. That will allow it the resources required to complete the requests.

Additional Information

How much RAM to add will be dependent on each system. A rough guess could be made based on the existing system, but an accurate recommendation is only determined via debug and reproduction of the problem or a thorough sizing to see what current vs expected resources are. Launch this link for the Performance Management Sizing tool URL.
An additional factor here is the unusually long 400 day as-polled data retention in the environment this was discovered in, as well as the requirement to have the report set to Hourly or As-Polled Resolution over a 12 month period.

Launch this link for a Knowledge Base Article detailing memory increase reconfiguration for PC after increasing resources