Page History

Info
The Performance Dashboard was removed from XperienCentral in version R28. Use the Administrative Pages instead.

Anchor
top top

The XperienCentral Performance Dashboard provides detailed information about how the parts of XperienCentral's infrastructure are functioning. Because XperienCentral is a complex system, the interaction between many different sub-systems and configuration options has a direct impact on how it performs. Using the Performance Dashboard, system administrators, developers, and application managers can quickly identify problems and then make the necessary configuration changes to ensure that XperienCentral performs optimally. The Performance Dashboard measures the speed and response time of page requests and internal queries as well as other settings that affect how XperienCentral runs and rates the results according to the optimal expected results.

The status of how the various XperienCentral subsystems are performing is then shown using an easily identifiable color-coded system:

Note
Notes: In a clustered environment, the statistics shown in the Performance Dashboard are only for the node/instance/server on which the Performance Dashboard is running, not the whole environment. The Administrative Pages are also useful for closely examining the performance of processes and events within XperienCentral.

To open the Performance Dashboard, navigate to Configuration > Performance Dashboard.

...

For caching, the following indicators related to performance are provided. In the "Status" column, you can click the orange and red indicators for more information on the meaning of the indicator itself and what you can do in order to improve the performance for the related item.

Response Time

For response times, the following indicators related to performance are shown. In the "Status" column, you can click the orange and red indicators for more information on the meaning of the indicator itself and what you can do in order to improve the performance for the related item.The values listed are those that have been measured since the last time the list was cleared.

...

 
To enable monitoring for web pages and/or pages generated by the Page Generator pages, select "Monitoring enabled".

:

Note
title Notes
These options are not persisted — Monitoring is enabled for the current session only. If the Tomcat server is restarted, these checkboxes are cleared. Enabling page response time monitoring can affect XperienCentral performance. Monitoring should not be constantly enabled.

...

Use the Queries tab to monitor and examine the queries that have taken the most time (the slowest). To enable query monitoring, select "Monitoring enabled":

:

Note
title Notes
The enabling of SQL query monitoring is not a persisted setting — Monitoring is enabled for the current session only. If the Tomcat server is restarted, the "Enable monitoring" checkbox is cleared. Enabling SQL query monitoring directly affects XperienCentral performance. Monitoring should not be constantly enabled.

...

This section describes the reason(s) that a system indicator may display a status of orange or red and the steps you can take to investigate the matter and change your XperienCentral settings in order to improve your website's performance.

Caching

If caching is enabled in XperienCentral, a green indicator is shown and if it is disabled, a red indicator is shown. Caching allows XperienCentral to handle the load created by many page requests by using an intelligent mechanism that returns pages without having to regenerate them completely every time they are requested. In all cases, caching improves website performance and it is highly recommended that you enable it for your website.

To enable/disable caching, navigate to the Setup Tool. On the General tab, navigate to the "frontend_system_settings" section and select allow_cache:

...

The caching module of XperienCentral stores a timestamp in the timestamp database for each cached web page. This timestamp is needed in order to determine whether the web page needs to be regenerated or whether it can be retrieved from the cache. For high volume websites, the number of web page requests per second can be so high that even the relatively simple task of performing one SQL query to retrieve this timestamp from the database can cause a bottleneck. If this exceeds 500 milliseconds, it may indicate a performance issue.

To prevent timestamp retrieval from becoming a bottleneck, timestamps can be cached in memory for <n> milliseconds. Note that this also causes a delay of <n> milliseconds; during the <n> milliseconds, modified web pages will not be regenerated. It is recommended that you set timestamp caching to at least 5000 milliseconds (5 seconds).  If you set timestamp caching to fewer than 5000 milliseconds, this can cause database bottlenecks especially for websites that experience a large number of page requests.

Timestamp caching is configured in the XperienCentral Setup Tool. Navigate to the "frontend_system_settings" section of the General (R30 and older) tab:

Anchor
lowering_page_response_times lowering_page_response_times

Lowering Page Response Times

Page response time performance for pages returned from the cache as well as pages generated by the Page Generator is measured in the following way:

 

 

 

 

Large Response Times for Individual Pages

...

Query execution time is measured in the following way: 

 

Query execution time that exceeds 500 milliseconds may indicate a performance issue. The list of the slowest queries contains both internal XperienCentral queries as well as queries that have been developed especially for your web site. If a query that you have developed is especially slow compared to other queries or is consistently slow, you might want to examine it carefully to see whether it is possible to restructure it for greater efficiency.

...

Average query response time is measured in the following way:

 

...

If the average query execution time is higher than 501 milliseconds, it could indicate a fundamental problem with the performance of the database that XperienCentral is using. If other applications are using the same database as XperienCentral, this can cause the average query execution time to increase. If you consistently experience high average query execution times, you should investigate how the database you are using for XperienCentral is configured and whether it is functioning correctly/optimally.

...

The average cache ratio is measured in the following way: 

...

A cache ratio that is less than 10 indicates that XperienCentral is having to generate a large number of pages instead of retrieving them from the cache. This can be because:

...

The XperienCentral debug options are useful during the website development phase but should not be enabled on a live website because they can slow down performance. The possible statuses of the debug option in the dashboard are: 

...

To enable/disable the XperienCentral debug options that affect performance, navigate to the Setup Tool. On the General (R30 and older) tab, navigate to "development_settings". Clear the checkbox for enable_debug_messages. In a production environment, the setting enable_view_resolve_cache should be selected.

...

The level at which you log messages has a direct effect on system performance. Each time a system event is logged, a small performance hit occurs. Logging messages of type SEVERE affects the system the least whereas logging at the INFO level can cause the system to slow down due to the sheer volume of messages that are written to the log. The effect that the logging level has on XperienCentral performance is indicated as follows.

 

 

 

To change the log level, follow these steps:

...

For more information on logging events in XperienCentral, see the Log administrative page.

Back to top

...

Creating Custom Performance Indicator Tabs

...