Report Generation takes 30mins

[Stuart Clement]

Hi There,

We have a desktop application using Telerik Reporting Q2 2009 SP1. We generate a PDF report and write it to disk. This process usually takes between 5 - 15 seconds depending on the report being generated (there are a number). We have 1 customer though who is running our application on Windows XP Pro SP3 and when they try to generate a report it takes up to 30mins!!! During this time 1 cpu of their Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz processor (4GB RAM) is maxed out to 100%. The report will eventually successfully generate and be written to disk, but it's just very strange behaviour. 

The particular report in question has a cover page, 2 sub-reports, a bar graph with 5 bars, and a small number of text bound fields. We are using the NeedDataSource to dynamically hook up the datasource for the report. The time it takes for this method to run under normal conditions is approx. 4-6secs. This is still the same on the customers computer too. It is the Report Rendering after databinding that takes the remainder of the time.  

We have not had any other customers report this behaviour and I am unable to replicate it for testing/debugging purposes. Is there any way I can turn on verbose logging in the telerik engine via a setting in the App.config file that will write a log file somewhere that might show what is happening during the report generation? We are running on .Net v2.0 (no 3.0 or 3.5 stuff at all).

thanks

Stuart

[Stuart Clement]

Found the solution.... turns out there was a clash with a printer driver for an Epson Stylus CX5500. Thank goodness for Process Monitor from SysInternals (now Microsoft)!! We uninstalled the driver and bingo, Report generation worked perfectly fine again.

Any idea why the reporting engine would be trying to load/use a printer driver during the process of generating a PDF file?? Very strange.

Stuart

[Peter]

Hi Stuart Clement,

Thank you for elaborating on your case.

We load the page settings of the default printer in order to get correct values for the page (e.g. margins) . This happens only the first time a report is being instantiated and in most cases it takes less than a second to acquire all the necessary information. However, we are going to investigate for a better way to handle this functionality.

Sincerely yours,
Peter
the Telerik team

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[Stuart Clement]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the reply. Once I was able to see the problem happening, I could see that the delay was not during final report rendering but on initial loading of the report classes. So what you are saying would make sense with this behaviour. The default printer on the system was indeed the Epson, even though the user never used it. With process monitor it was showing that a driver file was actually missing - it was throwing a file not found error. That might be a bit more helpful for you.

thanks again.

Stuart

[Steve]

Hello Stuart,

While we investigate for a better way to get correct values for the page, you might want to change the default printer to one that is working properly or set the MS XPS document writer as default one to avoid loading faulty drivers.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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