What's Good About ADW’s Server? 16.5 Has a Few New Enhancements!

Some of the enhancements to the Allegro Design Workbench (ADW) 16.5 release were introduced in the 16.3.1 release. The 16.5 version has expanded on these with an emphasis on increased performance.

The main new enhancements are:

• A new robust server is used
• Much improved server performance
• Lower management overhead
• Server Monitoring
• Mail Notifications
• XML based

Read on for more details…

The following provides a high-level flow of how the ADW server is accessed by various applications within ADW:

The speed improvements noted by several customers are significant in the 16.5 ADW release. What was taking several hours (large database uploads) in the past is now reduced to a few minutes! Part Table Generation (PTF Gen) has been reduced from 50 minutes to 2 minutes and 27 hours to 30 minutes with a couple of customer library examples.

New Server Commands

A few commands are available to allow convenient server actions.

ADWServer Start up
In an ADWSystem Console: Adwserver–start

• Reads the server configuration file
• Depends on a database name
• Default settings stored in the settings.ini file
• Log errors are saved to the Logging.properties file
• The Mailer.properties file contains “who” should be notified when any server exceptions occur
• The server metrics are maintained in the Activity.info file

ADW Server Stop
In an ADW System Console: Adwserver–stop

ADW Server Service

• Located in <ADW_INST_DIR>\server\bin
• In a cmdWindow: adwservicesinstall (server-name)
• In a cmdWindow: adwservicesremove

Server Configuration

The new server data is stored in a base database file. In addition, incremental databases are maintained as well as a History backup folder. Various server behaviors can be controlled:

• Database reload
• When database is compacted
• Session Timeout
• Backup interval

Here’s a screenshot showing some of the metrics that can be monitored:

I’ll provide more details on server metrics in a future blog post.

Please share your experiences with observing these new ADW enhancements.

Jerry “GenPart” Grzenia