Too Slow License Server Communication

[Altera_Forum]

I'm using a network license that university staff manage. The problem that I have is that the license check at the start of each synthesis takes a long time, around 20-30 seconds, which get quite annoying. Is there something that I could do to make it work faster?! Thanks, 

 Kaveh

[Altera_Forum]

Yeah that does seem like a long time. What is the setting in Quartus for the license server? Is it specified directly or is it using the LM_LICENSE_FILE environment variable. Sometimes a long license retrieval can occur if there is a long list of host names that the tool has to try. 

 Jake

[Altera_Forum]

I used to put the server address directly in Quartus, but now I'm using the LM_LICENSE_FILE variable, didn't make any difference though. One thing I should point out is that the connection is through a port tunnel, for security of course. And I use Putty to forward my local port. 

 Thanks, Kaveh

[Altera_Forum]

So I'm guessing you are off campus and you are tunneling into campus? 

 Jake

[Altera_Forum]

No actually, even though I'm in the lab at school, I still have to tunnel it, cuz it's in a different network, with all the ports blocked. So, basically I'm crossing networks, but we have a pretty fast network here, I wouldn't think that be the problem. Just to check though, do you happen to know, roughly, how many bytes get transferred during the license check?! Thanks, 

 Kaveh

[Altera_Forum]

you can test the server on the command line by typing: 

 lmutil lmstat -a -c NAME@PORT  to see if the license server is really that slow.

[Altera_Forum]

Same situation here. 

It was finally fixed by including the port segment in the license setup configuration (port@lmserver). "port" is not the port used by the license manager daemon (usually 27000) but the one used by the specific altera vendor daemon. To find out the port number ask the server administrator, or run "netstat -a" immediately after a Quartus compilation and look for connections between your host and the lmserver host.  julio

[Altera_Forum]

my post should say PORT@SERVER, oops!