I wish I had good news, but our testing has shown otherwise. IMHO, the mid-tier 7.x has severe problems with effectively caching the applications from the AR server. On our highest-powered test box we have mid-tier on an 8-core Win2K3 server with 12 gb RAM and both the Tomcat servlet and web server as installed by mid-tier 7.01. It is a 64-bit machine, but Tomcat and mid-tier cannot take advantage of that being 32-bit. IIS is not involved, although on the 64-bit Win2K3 where I have installed IIS and ServletExec they are not noticeably slower. IIS and ServletExec are 64-bit capable, but mid-tier is still 32. The 32-bit OS installs of either combo (Tomcat/Tomcat web or IIS/SE) are somewhat slower, but they are also mounted on half the hardware.
The ITSM 7 application consoles and forms take over one minute to load the first time they are accessed - up to 1.5 minutes for the bigger ones. Almost all of the CPU load while this is happening is on the AR server (dedicated 4-core with 10 gb RAM). You can usually see one very quick db access to the SQL Server (also a dedicated 4-core with 10 gb RAM). The AR Server appears to max out one CPU, so it must be the single admin thread, and stays that way for the full time of the form load - up to 1.5 minutes. If you manage to get the barely documented prefetch configuration working, the initial load times for those forms successfully prefetched drops into the 15-20 seconds range. With or without prefetching, after the form loads the first time, it loads within 2-3 seconds afterwards - but only for users with the exact same permissions groups (a joke in ITSM 7, where everyone is going to have a different combination of the dozens of permissions required for all of the applications). Other users may still get the 1.5 minute initial load time if their permissions are too different. If they work in the application a while and happen to open a form that was not prefetched or cached, they will go from a 2-second response time on forms they were accessing to a minute or more on the new one. The reactions of our test users to this irregular and laggy work environment has _not_ been favorable. Throwing more hardware at it is not the answer - the 32-bit apps can't use what I have now effectively - and we are already split out to 3 separate servers, one for each function, with gb NICs on their own gb switch. By the way, the initial cost of a prefetch after the web server restarts is about 15 minutes of continuous load on the AR server, during which the application displays degraded response times even in the User tool. Normally, the "footprint" on the AR server of opening forms in the User Tool is a single CPU spike at 15-20% for a second and the form loads in 2-3 seconds based mostly on complexity. The AR server takes an even smaller hit once the form is being loaded from a cache on the mid-tier, but when it misses the cache (not cached yet, not prefetched, different permissions of user) the load is HUGE - and the delay again exceeds 1 minute on large forms. I have been unable to obtain prefetch scripts from BMC that have been designed to properly support the ITSM 7 application and its permissions model, and I refuse to do the work of their entire benchmarking organization (that they were so proud of at UserWorld) and try to figure it out for myself. I have been told by support that this will be addressed in the next release, but they could not tell me if that meant maintenance release or product point release. At this point, we are very disappointed in the inconsistency of mid-tier performance, and are disinclined to inflict it on our user community (~300 support staff and 45K active customers with read licenses). My hope is that BMC will address these issues in whatever maintenance releases come out between now and out target implementation date this summer. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Remedy Database Administrator University of North Texas Computing Center http://remedy.unt.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Todd Pasterski Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 9:13 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Remedy 7 Performance Inquiry I have read the Sizing paper but that fails to address reality. We are in a Windows environment and are moving to 7 with a potentially large customer base in a Tenancy model where there may well be 1200-1500+ licensed users. Most will be floating licensed/casual users with 6-10% fixed heavy users. In our testing the mid-tier seems very slow but we do have a single server sharing IIS, SQL and Apps for this test box, we plan to push the web client. In classes the systems with 2 GB RAM choked on some processes. Can someone please share real experiences, good or bad, with regards to performance of the mid-tier and what might be suggested as hardware sizing suggestions for the system? Large or small designs, we just need information. ________________________________________________________________________ _______ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
