Performance Tuning Guide - EMC Community Network

Overview
Requirements — During the requirements phase, focus on defining the business requirements, not
the implementation details or functional requirements. For example, collecting tax is a business
requirement while having a tax lookup table is a functional requirement. Define the workload
partitioning scheme in accordance with business process requirements. For example, tax returns
are filed and processed in different locations depending on where you live. Remove requirements
that inhibit scalability, including case insensitive partial keyword search, excess search fields, large
search result sets, and so on.
Design — Most transactional systems are characterized as read-only (90% of transactions are
read-only). Exceptions to this rule include report generating systems, like billing statements, which
are mostly write systems. Most systems have a few business transactions that dominate system load.
Design the system to optimize performance for high load transactions. Exceptions to this rule include
infrequently run business transactions, like a once-a-year audit committee report that determines
business funding. Analyze your queries for scalability inhibitors.
Build — Instrument logging so it can be turned on or off. Assess query results and consolidate
multiple fetches (multiple queries) into single queries.
Test — Assess performance for single user tests and system under load. Use scripted business
transactions for single user testing. For load testing, turn off detailed tracing, use reasonable click
pacing, and use the same scripted business transactions as used for single user testing.
Implementation — Monitor coarse system utilization metrics (CPU, memory, disk I/O) correlated
with content, users, and business transaction volume. Maintain the databases.
Using iterative development
Create your xCP application in a series of phases. Break up the full application into modules and
establish frequent cycles of design, implementation, and testing (Figure 2, page 12). For xCP
applications, the iterative approach is more successful than the classic waterfall approach.
Figure 2. Iterative performance improvement
Thorough planning and testing is important for process-based applications and can make a difference
in whether a project succeeds or fails. xCP provides templates for fast prototyping and testing of
processes, forms, reports, and user interfaces. Anticipating risks, aligning on requirements, and
designing the solution carefully are critical to success.
12 EMC Documentum xCP 1.0 Performance Tuning Guide