Performance Tuning Guide - EMC Community Network

Measuring Performance
Build in realistic idle time — Provide realistic idle time between user operations. Base your built-in
idle time on expectations of real-user behavior. Real-user delays between successive operations result
from "think time", coffee breaks, or other forms of distraction. Your testing scenario can bundle many
concurrent users to create high aggregate volume of incoming operation requests. However, the
better you can model each user session with the appropriate between operation delays, the better
your multi-user testing can approximate performance expectations for the production system.
Monitor coarse grain metrics — Setup monitors to record coarse grain performance metrics on all
hardware. Bottlenecks can occur in any tier of the hardware infrastructure. Conduct a more detailed
analysis of those areas indicated as a problem by the coarse grain performance metrics. The coarse
grain performance metrics are:
• CPU consumption of the servers
• memory consumption of the servers
• network bandwidth consumption
• response time of a few key operations
• I/O activities of the servers or storage.
Run peak volume in steady state — Run each multi-user test and record the result for a steady state
period of at least 30 minutes. Keep each multi-user test run within several hours, including the
ramp-up time for adding users. Figure 34, page 82 illustrates a multi-user test in which it took 1.5
hours to ramp-up 4,000 users, which then ran at the 4,000 user steady state for one hour.
Figure 34. Ramping up number of users
82 EMC Documentum xCP 1.0 Performance Tuning Guide