Performance Tuning Guide - EMC Community Network

Designing the Application
• Only track essential events in the audit trail. Auditing can slow down response times and increase
CPU usage on the Content Server and database.
• Partition the workload and avoid bottlenecks.
Preventing high load user actions
Individuals can engage in certain activities that put excessive demands on the system and affect
overall system performance. For example, a case insensitive partial keyword search across several
types can lock the database until the query can be completed. Running a resource-intensive job or
report can also slow down system performance.
Design your application to prevent high load user scenarios from occurring. During development
and testing, devise scenarios that can slow down system performance and design these scenarios
out of your application.
Improving login speed
The user login operation takes 2-10 seconds to complete. The landing page that opens after a user
logs in affects login time the most. For fast logins, set the landing page to the default page or to
a blank search page.
Note: User preferences for the selected landing page negatively affect the performance improvement.
Maximizing query yield
Focus your query tuning effort on those queries providing the highest yield. The number of times a
query executes multiplied by query execution time determines the yield.
Figure 10, page 37 illustrates the possible yield of two queries. The first (fast) query executes 21 times
and each instance takes 0.3 seconds to execute. The second (slow) query executes one time and takes
1.8 seconds to execute. Because the fast query executes more frequently (21 times) than the slow
query (1 time) a 10% improvement in the fast query execution time reclaims more CPU bandwidth
(0.63 seconds) than a 10% improvement in the slow query execution time (0.18 seconds).
Even though there can be more latitude for improving slow queries, the frequency with which the
query gets executed often results in a larger aggregate impact. A small percentage improvement to
frequently executed fast queries can provide a better yield than a large improvement to infrequently
executed slow queries.
36 EMC Documentum xCP 1.0 Performance Tuning Guide