With the world of ProjectWise ever expanding we are seeing more and more users load balancing their ProjectWise integration servers. In fact if you are anything more than a small ProjectWise user I will always recommend putting the integration servers in a load balanced cluster. There are many benefits of a load balanced system ranging from ease of upgrade to increased up-time, in fact all of our hosted datasources are behind load balancers for performance and high availability. So if you have a load balancer on premise you may ask yourself, how do I know it is working? Well that is easy. What you will want to do is look at the task manager on the integration server and see how many threads the dmskrnl.exe process has open. The dmskrnl.exe process will start up with 14 threads and anything over that will essentially be a concurrently connected user. Now a user may have multiple connections established so it is not a true 1 to 1 relationship on concurrently connected users but it is close enough to guesstimate how many users are concurrently connected before getting the server team involved. To find this out what you will want to do is add the thread column to the task manager on each node and see just how many threads are open. If the number is way off between the two then the load balancer most likely is having some issues and you will want to get your server team involved, if the numbers are close then the load balancer is doing it's job. This is also a good way to get a rough idea of how many users are actually connected to your ProjectWise system on any given day. Below you will see an image to help understand what is going on. In this image I have one user connected which is why you see 15.
If you have any questions please let us know and I will be glad to elaborate.