Performance Tuning for Content Manager

Chapter 5. Designing and configuring for performance 101

Client application design impact on performance

The design of the client application can have a significant impact on

performance. When building and testing the client application, be sensitive to the

design and capabilities of the overall system. This includes the network that

carries the data between distributed system components.

Content Manager supplies two general-purpose clients (Windows client and

eClient) and a list of APIs and application components that can be assembled to

customize client applications. There can be many variations of client

applications, which we will discuss in general. Usually, there is not much to tune

on a client application after it is built. Most client performance issues are related

to the design and the APIs that are used to implement the application. As with all

application tuning, the biggest gains in performance come from well-designed

client applications.

Design the client applications to take best advantage of the servers’ capabilities

and to minimize their limitations. For example, it is possible to store image files as

binary large objects in the Library Server database and store nothing on the

Resource Manager. This is possible, but it does not take advantage of the

Resource Manager’s capabilities, but increases the load on the Library Server.

There might be circumstances where this is the most appropriate design,

although we cannot think of any.

Most of our discussion and scenario performance tuning covers a two-tier

application. The same considerations should apply for n-tier applications, at least

from the Content Manager Connector, and down to the server. Other tiers can

have an impact and should be tuned accordingly.

5.3 Configuration choices and trade-off

An important aspect of planning a new system is to understand the configuration

choices and trade-off. In this section, we include some of the important

configuration and application design choices, and their implication to system

performance. This material is an extraction from IBM Content Manager V8.2

Performance Tuning Guide, which can be found at:

http://www.ibm.com/software/data/cm/cmgr/mp/support.html

Search for “performance tuning guide” under white papers.

Content Manager configuration choices and the performance trade-off:

 Web clients or desktop clients?

– Web clients are typically easier to deploy and maintain.

102 Performance Tuning for Content Manager

– Desktop clients typically have faster response time and more functionality.

 For Web clients: direct retrieve or mid-tier conversion?

– Direct retrieve is faster and more scalable.

– Direct retrieve might require browser plug-ins or viewer applets.

 For Web clients: direct connect or federated access?

Federated access is slower than direct connection to Library Server, but more

flexible supporting search across heterogeneous back-end servers.

 For Web clients: connection pooling?

– Connection pooling makes more efficient use of Library Server resources.

– Scales to larger number of Web clients.

– Allows more control of mid-tier impact on Library Server resources.

 Out-of-the-box client program or custom client program?

– A custom client program can be tuned to your exact business requirements.

– Out-of-the-box client already includes the latest general-purpose tuning.

 For custom client: beans or Java/C++ API?

– Beans implement only the document models.

– Beans support rapid application development with a federated “reach.”

– Java/C++ APIs have the best performance.



For Java/C++ API custom clients: document data model or custom data model?

– A custom data model can be tuned to your exact business requirements.

– Data model already includes the latest general-purpose tuning.

 Document routing or advanced workflow?

– Document routing has better performance and higher scalability.

– Advanced workflow has more functions unavailable with document routing.

 Versioning?

– Versioning increases the Library Server database size.

– Accessing current version is faster than accessing previous versions.

 Text search?

– Text indexes increase the Library Server database size.

– Indexing text content reduces scalability as content must be retrieved from

the Resource Manager.

 Unicode?

– There is a substantial performance penalty for Unicode-enabling the

Library Server.

– Avoid using this feature unless you need the functionality.