Installing WebSphere

Web Navigator checkins with WebSphere and its HTTP Server

When using WebSphere with its HTTP Web Server (on port 80 vs. connecting directly to the Application Server on port 9080), errors may occur when checking in medium sized files (12m) with Web Navigator. ("Socket write error" or "413 Request Entity Too Large" errors). These errors indicate that you must configure the PostSizeLimit to -1 in the plugin-cfg.xml file. You must then regenerate the plugin and restart the Application Server.

FCS file transfer timeout

On WebSphere, if checkin/checkout to the FCS (File Collaboration Server) takes longer than the timeout configured on the MCS (Main Collaboration Server) Application Server, the operation may result in a timeout error and the checkin will not be successful.

ENOVIA tests show that files up to 1gb (a fairly large file) can be checked in/out in less than 15 minutes to an FCS Server accessible on the same LAN network as the client, so this is unlikely to be a problem with a typical session timeout of 20-30 minutes.

To calculate the relationship between the file size, file transfer rate, and session timeout, the following calculation can be used:

TotalFileTransferTime(s) = FileSize(kb) / FileTransferRate(kb/s)

In order for TotalFileTransferTime to be less than SessionTimeout, it is necessary for:

SessionTimeout(s) > FileSize(kb) / FileTransferRate(kb/s)

Therefore, for a given SessionTimeout, the largest FileSize that could be transferred would be:

FileSize(kb) = FileTransferRate(kb/s) * SessionTimeout(s)

The parameters, units, and unit abbreviations used in the above equations are as follows:

TotalFileTransferTime	Seconds	s
`FileSize`	Kilobytes	kb
`FileTransferRate`	Kilobytes per second	kb/s
`SessionTimeout`	Seconds	s

Configuring for large FCS synchronization operations

If WebSphere is used with a File Collaboration Server performing large synchronization operations of 1500 files or more, the PostSizeLimitParameter attribute for the node(s) that host the FCS must be -1 (unlimited) or at least 5mb (5242880 bytes). WebSphere is usually deployed behind one or more Web Servers (such as Apache) and is connected through HTTP transport plugins. The HTTP transport plugins configuration file, plugin-cfg.xml, contains the PostSizeLimitParameter attribute for each Server cluster node.

Promoting tasks in ENOVIA applications

On AIX with Websphere, the -Xmso1152k variable must be added to the JVM configuration for Websphere to prevent it from possibly crashing when certain tasks are promoted. This variable can be added through the WebSphere Server console or directly to the server.xml file. The full JVM argument should look like this:

"-Xmso1152k -Xss1024k -Xms640m -Xmx640m -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8 -Ddefault.client.encoding=UTF-8 -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

UTF-8 settings are included in this argument. If you are not using UTF-8, these settings are not required.