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Topic Title: WEXP - Why takes "export document properties" so long
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Created On: 30-Oct-2007 10:21
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 30-Oct-2007 10:21
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Michael Eisele

Posts: 5
Joined: 28-Sep-2006

Dear all,

I have again a question related to WEXP execution time: I noticed that for an export of a larger module (which takes > 1h on my PC) most of the time (>30min) is spent on the "export document properties" part. The actual export of the objects seems to be already complete when the message "export document propoerties" is displayed: I killed DOORS via task manager when the message appeared and looked to the Word file created so far, and it looked complete and well formatted. During these more than 30 minutes of "export document properties" Word consumes 99% of processor time thus blocking the PC.

So my question is: What is WEXP doing during that phase, and how could this waste of user & processor time be avoided? Any experience or proposals?

Thank you for any useful tips.

Michael Eisele 
Boehringer-Ingelheim Germany

Edited: 30-Oct-2007 at 10:24 by Michael Eisele
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 11-Dec-2007 14:40
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Carl Wilson

Posts: 3
Joined: 6-Dec-2002

I'm not certain what WEXP is doing, but the times depend on the DOORS/WEXP version, your machine and how you do the export.

I've just done some comparisons between DOORS 7.1 with TREK 5.1 and DOORS 8.2 with TREK 5.2 (TREK is the Thales/Telelogic Requirements Engineering Kit. It includes a version of WEXP). Experiments carried out on a dual-core machine with 2Gb memory running WinXP.

WinXP on dual-core seems slower than Win2K, but I've no measurements to support that. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256 for a 'fix' for demand based scheduling issues with WinXP on multi-core/processor machines.

Turning on caching on the command line seems to give a some improvement if you need to regenerate the document.

The best improvement is from simply having the Word window open. My worst times for a 400 page document is approx. 12 mins. This seems to be more relevant to WinXP operation. If I don't have the Word window open then times are ~ hours.

Times with DOORS 7.1 are significantly better.

The usual solutions on improving DOORS performance (network, server, etc.) also apply.

Hope that helps.

Anybody else got any suggestions?

MfG
Carl Wilson
Thales Underwater Systems
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 12-Dec-2007 08:45
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Eric Piallat

Posts: 13
Joined: 10-Dec-2007

My previous experiences with WEXP it that most of the time was wasted by Word itself, either with:
* pagination
* spell checking
* or auto-save

You can't realy solve the first problem, except perhaps by avoiding multiple { TOC } fields at the beginning of your document. (Table of content that grows and forces refresh of table of figure, which forces itself refresh of table of content...)

The second one can be turned off in your export template, by defining "no-checking" for every styles.

I never managed to switch off the third one. If Word is visible during export, you may see the little disk blinking in Word's status bar during auto-saves.
The only work-around I found for this was to save word files into the fastest disk available from my Word installation. (Export time could be multiplied by 4 or 5 when using a network drive.)


Hoping this can help.

Edited: 13-Dec-2007 at 18:14 by Eric Piallat
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 12-Dec-2007 13:00
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Andrew Tagg

Posts: 151
Joined: 26-Oct-2004

My thought is that Eric could be right regarding the pagination, especially if you are using Word2003. I have posted a lot of word export speed tips at the following link. All require some modification of the word.inc dxl though, so I'm not sure how relevant that is to the WEXP exporter, especially the TREK version

In order of preference though, my experience is that the greatest increase by far comes from regular flush of the word undo buffer (instantly ~60%increase), followed by iconify of the word app, followed by switch off all those things word does to 'help'; spellcheck as you type, grammar check as you type, auto save.

I use export to doc properties myself and haven't found this to be slow at all, so suspect something else is going on in between.

https://forum.telelogic.com/customer/doors/messageview.cfm?catid=17&threadid=3032

Carl, I would be interested to get in touch to talk Thales experiences if you like, my email is included below.

Hope this can help.
Andrew

-------------------------
Andrew Tagg
Thales Air Systems, Melbourne
Australia.
andrew.tagg@thalesatm.com
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 13-Dec-2007 18:20
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Eric Piallat

Posts: 13
Joined: 10-Dec-2007

I forgot the undo thing! Perhaps because the single known way to work it around is modifying your export script.

By the way, if someone knows how to permanently disable the undo tool into MS-Word, I would gladly take the tip: we use a dedicated server for Wexp-jobs, and this Word installation do not need any undo feature.
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 11-Jan-2008 09:32
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Michael Eisele

Posts: 5
Joined: 28-Sep-2006

Dear all,

thank you a lot so far for the comments and hints. Based on these I will do some more experiments how to speed-up the export. I will report any useful results and experiences.

However, my basic question was not really adressed, why the last phase of the export (when "export document properties" is displayed) tkaes so song. In this phase all objects have already been exported, all TOCs updated etc. The Word document ***is*** already complete. But still this phase takes approximately the same time as the actual export before.

best regards,

Michael
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