Oracle UCM: Web Site Performance Tuning

Site Studio Performance Tuning Brian “Bex” Huff Chief Software Architect

Agenda
General web-site tuning tips
The complex basics
High-performance architecture
Tune your system, network, and servers
Tuning Site Studio pages
Oracle UCM specific tips

Philosophy of Performance Tuning
“ We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil ”
-- Donald Knuth
Need a holistic view of your systems and processes
Use data-flow analysis and diagrams

Why Are Network Applications Slow?
Not enough CPU
Needed for text processing, number crunching, cryptography
Not enough memory
Needed to cache temporary data for faster processing
Not enough bandwidth
Needed to support large data transfers, large user bases
Too much latency
Multiple round-trips to servers makes any single request slow
Most web applications are slow because of bandwidth/latency
extra CPU and memory help, but usually are not enough

Bandwidth and Latency in Real Life
48 inches wide
Bandwidth:
2,000,000 barrels per day!
800 miles long
Latency:
15.8 days!

Bandwidth and Latency On The Web
Bandwidth:
Number Of Simultaneous Requests You Can Support
Latency:
Time Added To Each Request Due To Network and Distance
A web page with 50 images means 51 HTTP requests !
High bandwidth and high latency? Pages “feel” slow
80-90% of response time spent in downloading web resources
Images, CSS files, JS files, AJAX requests
Source: http:// developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Analyze The Flow Of Data
How does the data get to the client?
How many applications are involved?
Where is the bottleneck?
Latency: ping , traceroute , or tracert
Bandwidth: mrtg, wget , or ask your ISP/IT department
CPU and Memory: top or taskmanager
On the web, latency is usually a bigger problem than bandwidth
Distance and network health between web client and web server
Assume New York to San Francisco latency is ~100 ms
if your page has 100 images, that's 10 seconds for just latency!
In practice, browser caching and multiple downloads help

UCM Data Flow Diagram
How do the actual bytes flow from client, to server, and back?

Reduce CPU Needs of Web Pages
General tip: simplify your web pages so they render faster
Use fewer DOM elements
tables within tables within tables
Put CSS at the top, and JS at the bottom
CSS is rendered immediately
JS must be 100% loaded before it executes
Avoid complex CSS
AlphaImageLoader filter
CSS expressions

Reduce Bandwidth Needs of Web Pages
General tip: use smaller web resources
Compress your HTML, CSS, and JS files
minimize their size in general
inline GZIP compression works well
Use small, web-optimized images
avoid scaling them in HTML
Use GET for AJAX
Reduce use and complexity of cookies
cookie state is sent with every request

Reduce Latency Of Web Pages
General tip: use fewer web resources
eliminate images when CSS works just as well
consolidate CSS and JS into fewer files
correct any 404 error for missing images
Use CSS SPRITES
Like Google does

Reduce Latency Of Web Pages (cont.)
Make fewer network requests
Avoid multiple DNS lookups on the same page
Minimize URL redirects
Serve static files from multiple servers
Browsers download 2 web resources at a time from one domain
So, make more domains: img1 .company.com, img2 .company.com
Use content delivery network
Amazon Cloudfront : cheap, but mainly North American
Akamai : expensive, but global
Make content “ cacheable ”

High-Performance Architecture
Web Page Cache / Reverse Proxy
Cache rendered web pages to take load off of Site Studio
make sure it understands cookies and GZIP compression
Contribution / consumption environment
Optimize contribution for read/write
Optimize consumption for read (mostly)
Use a dedicated server for each Oracle UCM instance
Do not share with other applications
Schedule resource-intensive behavior in the off-hours
Virus scanners and web spiders
Backups, archives, batchloads

High-Performance Architecture (cont.)
Create a cluster
in most cases with 10gr3, significantly improves performance
general best practice for failover, high reliability, and uptime
Minimize latency in local network
keep database, LDAP, and other resources on same subnet
keep filesystem speedy: attached storage, SAN, NAS
Monitor CPU and Memory usage
bandwidth, and latency are usually the culprits
CPU and memory can be a bottleneck for heavy consumption servers
If you use UCM 7.5 with Verity search, CPU can be an issue
if you use database search, database CPU may be an issue

Sample High-Performance Architecture

Make Static Content Cacheable
Web caches will store static content (JS, CSS, images)
Modest performance gains by keeping them in-memory
Caching dynamic content is better, but harder…
Add Expires or MaxAge HTTP header to content
allows a cache to know how long to store content
for static content, set this in the web server
for dynamic content, set it in Site Studio
Properly configure ETag HTTP headers on clusters
If you're not using them, just remove them

Make Dynamic Content Cacheable
Dynamic HTML pages might be different per user
Multi-step forms and personalization are cache-killers
Different users see different things at the same URL!
Not all caches work when cookies are present
Need smart caches, and smart personalization
Drive customization with static CSS and JS files
Read cookies from JS, use AJAX to alter pages
Configure cache to ignore cookies, or
Configure web server to omit cookie header
Security checks can be slow
How far away is your user database?
Is it cached locally, or do we need to check ActiveDirectory or LDAP?

Site Studio Specifics
UCM performance rule-of-thumb
20 read-only service calls per second per GHz CPU
5 read/write service calls per second per GHz CPU
Problem: some Site Studio pages are multiple service calls!
Each calls at least the SS_GET_PAGE service
Many fragments and templates call GET_SEARCH_RESULTS
Many also call DOC_INFO
Not uncommon for one page to have 4 UCM service calls!
Reduces performance to 5 page views per second per GHz CPU

UCM Specifics
Minimize number of queries per page
Use static lists instead of dynamic lists when possible
Optimize search queries
Use <matches> or <contains> instead of <substring>
Note: <contains> only works in "zone indexed" metadata fields
Avoid time stamps in queries
Tune Java VM to have as much memory as you can give it
JAVA_MAX_HEAP_SIZE=1024
Optimize the Oracle Database
Install the OracleQueryOptimizer component
Cursor_Sharing=SIMILAR
optimizer_mode=first_rows

Finding Slow Pages: Passive
Configure web server logs to measure page creation time
Apache: use mod_log_config and the LogFormat directive
IIS: use W3C extended log file format, and the "Time Taken" field
Enable UCM System Audit Information flags
requestaudit
pagecreation
searchquery
systemdatabase
Parse log files to find slow pages and slow queries

Finding Slow Pages: Active
Run a web spider on your system
Caution: this can crash your server!
Use web logs or spider logs to find slow pages
Test slow pages once with auditing turned on
You may be surprised how many database calls there are!
Test slow pages with a load tester
How many users can do this simultaneously?

Finding Slow Pages: Active (cont.)
Bandwidth:
How fast can you download a static 1MB HTML file?
Latency:
How fast can you download a 1k HTML file with a hundred 10k JS files?
Keep excellent notes!
Only way to measure performance improvement

Making Pages Faster
Reduce number of service calls
Reduce number of database calls
Optimize IdocScript
Minimize eval and executeService calls
Instead use setValue , setResourceInclude
Eliminate all IdocScript errors: these are performance drags
Use cacheInclude for slow sections of pages
Optimize JSP/ASP/Java code
In general, same rules apply
Reduce complexity, reduce number of service calls

Making Pages Faster (cont.)
Consolidate JS and CSS files
Place them into a global fragment, or global region template
Standard best-practice for maintainable code
Set flags to cache pages
Built-in with the custom section property "ssMaxAge"
Passes the cache control header
Watch out for cookies!
Disable unnecessary JavaScript files
Requires custom component
On consumption environment, disable contributor JS files
Most sites don't need the JS files that contain navigation

Review
General web site performance tuning is critical
Data flow diagrams can highlight bottlenecks
Some architectures scale better than others
Size CPU and Memory appropriately
Cluster your servers
Include a reverse proxy
Keep network resources close, and fast!
Understand why specific Site Studio pages are slow
Reduce number of service requests per page
Focus on making “cacheable” content

Useful Tools and References
Yahoo YSlow plug-in to Firefox: a must have!
http:// developer.yahoo.com/yslow /
JMeter load tester
http:// jakarta.apache.org/jmeter /
Heritrix web crawler
http:// crawler.archive.org /
Varnish HTTP Accelerator
http:// varnish.projects.linpro.no /
Yahoo web site performance tuning best practices
http:// developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Oracle UCM performance tuning guide:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10316_01/cs/cs_doc_10/documentation/admin/performance_tuning_10en.pdf

Now Available…

My Company: http:// bezzotech.com
My Blog: http:// bexhuff.com
My Self: [email_address]
Questions?

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Oracle UCM: Web Site Performance Tuning

by Brian Huff

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Oracle UCM: Web Site Performance Tuning Presentation Transcript