What is a “process” mentioned in the Processing Station properties? Do I need to set higher or lower numbers of processes?
The number of processes is the number of OCR and document conversion processes that run in parallel on the Processing Station.
Usually each process gets from the queue one file at a time. For example, if a Processing Station runs 3 processes, it will process 3 files from the queue in parallel. The processes on the Station are completely independent of one another: if one process has finished recognizing the file, it returns the result to the Server Manger and immediately gets the next file from the queue, while the other processes may be still processing other files at this time.
By default, the number of processes on each Processing Station is set to N+1, where N is the number of CPU cores on the station. This value is optimal for processing A4 pages that contain mostly text.
You may find if useful to change the default value in the following cases:
- When processing many very small images, significant time is spent on copying image files from the Server Manager to the Processing Stations and back. During this time, the CPUs of the station are idle. It makes sense to increase the number of processes on the station to provide better loading of the CPUs.
- When processing very large files, each of them may require a lot of RAM on the Processing Station. If the jobs are fail with “Not enough memory” error message, try reducing the number of processes on the station. Then fewer files will be processed concurrently and less memory will be occupied.
- If you use a HyperThreading CPU, it is recommended to set the value of this parameter to 2N+1, where N is the number of physical CPU cores.
