Hi All,
Sorry for this lenghty mail but its CRITICAL for us.

We are having a very difficult time with the mid-tier performance for
one of the applications we have developed. The application is basically
a expenditure approval workflow for our client. The client can access
the application over a LAN when they are the their office of through a
dial-up connection using VPN software from any location outside the
office.

The application revolves around a display from that is loaded after the
login, this form contains all the fields related to the application such
as expense amount, user dept,attachment field, etc.In this form we have
around 100 active links and 200 fields (including a Attachment and a
diary field) doing various validations and enable/disable of fields
based on the stage at which the request is in and the designation of the
logged in User. Apart form this we have another 20 forms in the
application containing master data for Departments,Divisions,etc.

The main problem we have right now is that this form takes a long time
to load after login. We tested the application and it page takes around
15 seconds to load over the LAN and 40 seconds over a dial-up
connection, both of which the client finds unacceptable.
We tried contacting remedy but they basically asked us to fine tune our
mid-tier and JVM settings etc, apart from that we haven't found any
help.

If any of you have faced such issues and found and probable solutions
please let me know.
Also If any of you can suggest what the should be the time benchmark for
an application of this size over the mid-tier, it will of great help in
communicating to the client.

ARS 5.1.2
Mid-Tier 5.01.02 Patch 1244
Solaris 9
Informix 9.3
Java version 1.4.0

Regards,
Prasan.

There is a Remedy white paper called Performance Goals and Best Practices
that discusses Mid-Tier bench testing.

You may also want to check the tuning of your Mid-Tier. The following
information is from a white paper that Remedy put out for version 5.0 Mid-
Tier:

For more information about ServletExec settings, refer to the ServletExec
documentation.
Configuration Tool settings
Adjust the following settings as appropriate:
General Settings �¨ Preference Server(s): If no preference servers are set
up, leave this setting blank. If more than one server is specified, put the
server with the most preferences at the beginning of the list.
General Settings �¨ Log Level: For best performance, this value should be
set to BASIC.
Cache Settings �¨ Update Interval (in seconds): Default is 3600. Set to a
large number such as 86400, which updates once a day.
Deployer Settings �¨ Background Deployment: Default is ON. If the
applications are not changing, setting Background Deployment to OFF will
improve performance slightly.
config.properties file settings
Adjust the following settings as appropriate:
arsystem.poolingmaxconnectionsperserver: Default is 50. This should be
set to the approximate number of expected concurrent operations to a single
AR System server. This maps closely to the number of active users (not just
those logged in, but those that are truly active at the same time).
arsystem.poolingmaxtotalconnections: Default is 500. This should be set
to the approximate number of expected concurrent operations to all AR
System servers with which this mid tier communicates.
2
3 ServletExec settings
Adjust the following settings as appropriate:
Virtual Machine Options �¨ Minimum Heap Size: Use at least 65536
kilobytes.
Virtual Machine Options �¨ Maximum Heap Size: This setting depends on how
many applications are hosted. Use at least 131072 kilobytes. (For Remedy
HelpDesk, a value of 397248 was used.)

Prasan,

I believe someone has to be honest with you: With anything but most the
basic application, you will never get the current Midtier release to exhibit
performance that could be defined as 'acceptable'. There are countless
postings on this issue on ARSlist, and no white paper or "tips and trick"
page is going to help you.

Do Remedy know this? Well they've just finished re-writing their web client
which will become the Midtier 6.3 release, currently in beta. They are
pinning their future in the web enabled enterprise market on this release,
and hence you'd hope it would be a good one. Apparently it's faster than the
user tool! Perhaps you should give them a call and ask for a beta copy?

We're certainly looking forward to the Midtier 6.3 release. Perhaps we can
run it side by side against our web system to demonstrate how quickly Remedy
applications can really run!


Stan
--
Symbiont Solutions,
http://www.symbiontsolutions.com