Ephemeral Port Issue with Essbase Has Been Fixed!

The issue that has plagued a number of Essbase customers over the years related to running out of available ports has finally been fixed!

This issue, which often manifested itself with errors in the Essbase error 10420xx range, was caused by how the Essbase Java API communicated with the server. In essence, whenever a piece of information was needed, the Essbase Java API grabbed a port from the pool of available ports, did its business, and then released the port back to the pool. That doesn’t sound bad, but the problem occurs due to how Windows handles this pool of ports. Windows will put the port into a timeout status for a period of time before it makes the port available for reuse and the default timeout in Windows is 4 minutes! Further, the size of the available pool of ports is only about 16,000 ports in the later versions of Windows. That may sound like a lot of ports, but the speed of modern computers makes it possible, and even likely, that certain operations, such as the outline APIs, that call Essbase many, many times to get information would be subject to this issue. Frankly, we see this issue quite often with both VB and the Java Essbase Outline Extractors.

We brought this issue to the attention of the Java API team and assisted them by testing a prerelease version of the Java API jars. I am happy to report the fix was released with Essbase 11.1.2.3.502. In addition, there is a new essbase.properties setting that allows you to turn the optimization on or off:

olap.system.socketoptimization=false

It is our understanding that this optimization is turned on by default. I also checked the default essbase.properties files shipped with both Essbase 11.1.2.3.502 and 11.1.2.4 and did not see that setting in those files. It may be one of those settings that is there in case it messes something else up. The work of our own Jay Zuercher in our labs and searching Oracle Support seems to have confirmed that thought. There is apparently an issue where EIS drill-through reports don't work in Smart View if socket optimization is turned on. It is documented in Oracle Support Doc ID 1959533.1.

There is also another undocumented essbase.properties setting:

olap.server.socketIdleTime

According to Oracle development, this value defaults to 300 ms but there should be little need to ever change it. The only reason it is there is to tune socket optimization in case more than 2 sockets are used per Java API session.

Jay also tested the 11.1.2.4 version in our labs with the Next Generation Outline Extractor. With the default settings, one large test outline we have, "BigBad", with about 120,000 members in it, extracted in 1 minute and 50 seconds.  With socket optimization turned off, the same outline was only about 25% complete after 2 hours.   In summary, this fix will be very useful for a lot of Oracle customers.