GetClientPolicies.aspx is taking longer to provide client policies

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Customer is experiencing an unusual slowness on getting client policies after they upgraded to ITMS 7.5 SP1 HF5.
Most client machines were not getting their policies after too many retries.

Client Agents are unable to get policies reliably.  Agent logs repeat "Policy request failed: Unexpected response from 'http://SMPServer.domain.com/altiris/ns/agent/getclientpolicies.aspx';: the server is currently busy or paused. "

"Policy request failed: Unexpected response from 'http://SMPServer.domain.com/altiris/ns/agent/getclientpolicies.aspx';: the server is currently busy or paused."

Cause

Known issue.The issue appears to be more about the number of software updates that the customer has enabled.

Based on the data collected, each Managed Delivery policy takes about 200+ milliseconds for each targeted computer.  Individual policies can’t be generated concurrently and these managed delivery policies can't be cached due to the limitations of this release version, so each computer must incur the full cost of each of it's managed delivery policies.

By fixing this "CantCache" issue with Manage Delivery policies should speed up the amount of time these policies need for getting them generated. Instead of taking 200+ milliseconds per policy per computers, it would be just 200+ per policy plus less than 1 millisecond per policy per computer (at least while it's still cached).

Resolution

This issue has been reported to our Symantec Development team. A permanent fix has been targeted for a future release. Some optimizations on this area were already introduced with our ITMS 7.6 HF2 release and later.

A pointfix has been created for those customers still using ITMS 7.5 SP1 HF5. Please see attachment file.

INTRODUCTION
Fix resolves the problem with slow load of Managed Delivery Policies that was causing getclientpolicies.aspx to take too long to generate the client policies.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENT
Installed SMP 7.5 SP1 HF5
Installed SWM 7.5 SP1 HF5

HOW TO INSTALL THIS POINTFIX
1. Log in as administrator
2. Retrieve files from the attached archive to the NS hard drive.
3. Click on PFinstaller.exe
4. Click install files button

CHANGES MADE
Backported from 7.6.HF2:
- Latest version of policy cache
- Client license handling in NS Core
License check logic is removed from SWM code, licenses are handled in NS Core. Managed delivery policies now are cacheable.

HOW TO UNINSTALL THIS POINTFIX
1. Log in as administrator
2. Retrieve files from the archive to the NS hard drive.
3. Click on PFinstaller.exe
4. Click uninstall files button