Any application using the FLEXlm/FLEXnet TIMEOUT feature has a minimum license release time of 900 seconds, which means your license will not be checked back into the pool before 15 minutes of inactivity has elapsed. This may be alright most of the time, but it isn’t the most efficient use of your licenses if you want to release the license immediately for others to use.
Even worse, some application vendors have their own minimum time out period that can make the wait far longer, as in the case of MATLAB from MathWorks. MATLAB’s release time is set to 14,400 seconds, which means there can be no activity — no keystrokes, no mouse clicks, nothing — for an entire 4 hours before a license is checked in. (To find out more, see Does MathWorks support the FLEXnet TIMEOUT feature for MATLAB?)
So, in the case of MATLAB, we’ve gone from wasting 15 minutes of valuable license time to wasting 4 hours, and unfortunately, this only gets worse. You may be confronted with a situation where your application vendor has opted not to support the TIMEOUT feature at all, leaving you with no way to efficiently check in your licenses, as described here: Using the FLEXlm TIMEOUT option with Apex.
But you’re not out of luck if you’re faced with such problems. We’ve developed License Saver particularly for this purpose, so that you can take charge of your licenses. With License Saver, you have control and flexibility with your license usage and can easily overcome such limitations your license manager or applications have placed on release of licenses.
With License Saver, you can:
• Monitor and detect idle licenses for any application using LM-X, FLEXlm/FLEXnet, or IBM LUM
• Suspend applications automatically and/or manually (release licenses immediately)
• Set different timeout periods for individual applications
What’s more, you can do all this and many other license management activities without your end-users’ knowledge if you choose.
License Saver works with LM-X, FLEXlm/FLEXnet, and IBM LUM, and applications such as:
• Catia
• Autocad
• Inventor
• Solidworks
• Pro Engineer
• Mentor Graphics
• ArcGIS
• MathCAD
• and many others
To learn more about License Saver, check out our slideshow:
