I need to follow-up on this Improvisations eZine article about the Kronos Workforce Central Timekeeper "Callable Totalizer" settings. I had a couple of people quickly respond to me about that article asking about the settings as they were eager to give them a try. So I grabbed my notes (screenshot #1 from v5.0 click to enlarge) and sent off a response, promising to follow-up here. Well it looks like I've been caught... It seems that Kronos pulled the Callable Totalizer (CT) into the main Totalizer program with the Background Processor (BGP) starting at v5.1 or 5.2. My CT notes were from v5.0. I don't have a 5.1 system to look at right now but I'll check and report back later if someone here doesn't beat me to it!
The only choice we have starting with 5.2 (screenshot #2 from 5.2, click to enlarge) is to set the number of threads in the BGP to more than one. I've spoken to a couple of people from Kronos about this and neither one said that much is to be gained by messing with that setting. It's better to run a second BGP. Doing a little more spelunking I find that the best practice has more to do with maximums than minimums.
If you have a combined Workforce Timekeeper App/BGP server and testing shows you that the BGP isn't keeping up, you might find a benefit to configure two BGP threads. (If you do try two you might also need to increase the maximum number of database connections above the default.) If you have a standalone BGP you can configure up to four processing threads. More than that provides diminishing returns and one should consider another instance of a BGP.
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