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Performance Guide

The performance of FootPrints can be greatly enhanced by utilizing appropriate hardware and by carefully selecting the settings for FootPrints, the operating system, and the database.

What to Expect

FootPrints web pages, use an SQL-based database (such as SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, or Postgres) and should typically take a few seconds to display.  FootPrints pages using the built-in database. Performance should be equally efficient for small Workspaces, but once the number of issues increases above ten thousand in a single Workspace, the time to display some pages, such as the Homepage, increases, and could require as much as 20 seconds or more.  In these cases, we recommend changing over to a SQL-based environment.

What Hardware to Use

The BMC web site has a listing of recommended hardware to use for a FootPrints server.  Refer to the Technical Overview and System Requirements PDF on our Support Web site.

FootPrints Settings

The following suggestions can improve FootPrints performance through the web interface:

  1. Instant Talk—The current version of Instant Talk is implemented as a server-side only feature and polls the server periodically, determining whether or not people are talking.  This polling frequency is higher during actual Instant Talk conversations.

The performance of the FootPrints server can be improved by taking into account the following:

Both of these options can be selected on the Administration | System | Instant Talk page.  Recommended settings for a lower frequency are:

  1. Debugging—FootPrints can create debug logs to help the support team diagnose customer problems.  If the debug logs are still turned on after problems have been solved, large amounts of debug data is written whenever FootPrints accesses that particular feature.  This inevitably slows down the system.  Absent a specific problem, it is recommended that debugging be disabled for the sake of system performance.

FootPrints alerts the System Administrator (upon login) when debugging is enabled.  Some examples of debugging are email and LDAP.

Debugging is administered from the Debug Manager.  Access the Debug Manager by selecting Administration | System | Debug Manager from the FootPrints Toolbar.

  1. Temporary Files—FootPrints creates temporary files in it's own tmp directory and cleans this directory out on a regular basis.  However, older versions of FootPrints may have left files in this tmp directory that, if not removed, can degrade system performance.

Delete the files found in the footprints/temp directory.  If you do not clear the temp directory on a regular basis (e.g., you have 20,000+ files on a small installation), you may be experiencing other problems.  If that is the case, email Support for additional assistance.

  1. Escalation Rules—FootPrints can handle large numbers of Escalation rules very easily, and does so from a background process.  However, it is useful to 'clean up' unused rules in order to streamline that process.  Turn off unused Escalation rules from the Administration | Workspace | Escalation page.  Escalation rules can always be turned back on as needed.

If you have deleted Workspaces, remove the Escalation files from those Workspaces' database directories.  These directories can be found by selecting Administration | System | Workspaces and clicking the option for List All Workspaces.  The resultant page displays all Workspaces, their location on the server, whether they are deleted, and which Address Book the Workspace is using.

Find Workspaces that are listed with (*** Deleted ***) next to the name.  The location of a Workspace is displayed below the Workspace's name (for example, the location might be c:\FootprintsServiceCore\db\MASTER3).  Find this location on the server and go into the MR directory.  The MR directory contains files related to this specific Workspace.  Delete any files and folders with Escalation in their name (e.g., Escalation, EscalationEmails, etc.)  This prevents FootPrints from running these rules even though the Workspace has been deleted.

  1. Homepage—An Agent can select the number of Issues that are displayed on his or her Homepage.  Select My Preferences | Homepage List from the FootPrints Toolbar to set the number of Issues that are displayed.  Having a large number of issues (e.g., 50+) displayed on the Homepage slows down the display of the page.  If an Agent experiences slow performance, lowering the number of Issues displayed on the Homepage can help to improve the performance.

System Settings

The following list describes potential system problems, their causes, and their solutions.  Most of these issues concern Windows servers:

  1. Disk Fragmentation—As usage increases, hard disks in Windows-based systems can become very fragmented.  Once they do, access to these disks becomes much slower.  In order to remedy this, Windows is bundled with a disk defragmentation utility.  Running this utility has shown to increase performance of a FootPrints server by 2-4 times compared to the fragmented performance.  Disk defragmentation should be run on a regular basis.
  2. Viruses—Once a server is hit by a virus, particularly via Windows/IIS security holes, programs may either work incorrectly or run very slowly. Maintain virus checkers on all web servers running IIS and visit the Windows Update site (http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com) to apply security patches.
  1. Anti-Virus Software—Although anti-virus software prevents performance-related issues from viruses, performance can be impacted due to an anti-virus program constantly checking files on each read and write.  Here is a test to see if that may be happening on your FootPrints machine:
  2. Open a command prompt on the FootPrints server.
  3. Change directory (cd) to c:\FootprintsServiceCore\cgi (or the path to your FootPrints directory).
  4. Enter c:\FootprintsServiceCore\bin\perl\bin\perl MRbenchmark.pl

If the path to your Perl is different from the default, substitute that path for C:\ footprints\bin\perl\bin\perl

This should produce output similar to the following:

Please wait...

Started at 14:39:00 and finished at 14:39:10.

If the time from start to finish is greater than 20 seconds, you may need to fine-tune your current anti-virus program or get a less intensive program.

If your anti-virus software is running and you get a time greater than 20 seconds, uninstall the anti-virus software, reboot, and rerun MRbenchmark.pl.  If this decreases the time significantly, you should reinstall the anti-virus software with different parameters.  For instance, it might be useful to turn off constant file checking and have scans scheduled during off-peak hours.

Let a BMC Support Engineer know your results if they are abnormal or do not improve with these tips. 

  1. Network Access—This is a performance issue that is usually diagnosed easily because it affects only some users.  There are no settings within FootPrints that would cause network performance to decrease for some users while not affecting others.  If certain users experience degraded performance while others do not, check the hubs, routers, and switches that connect them to the network.

A more critical problem, discussed later, is database access over the network.

  1. IIS Processing—IIS is configured to process four simultaneous web requests per CPU.  However, if a fifth request arrives, it is queued and waits for the next available process thread.  A timeout on that request occurs if an available process thread is not allocated in an appropriate amount of time, which may appear as though FootPrints has failed.  Enabling IIS to run more than from simultaneous process threads can prevent this from occurring.

Microsoft has posted information on how to increase the number of threads each processor can handle (see the MSDN article: Optimizing IIS Performance).  Making this change requires an administrator to edit the registry.  Editing the registry is a dangerous task since a wrong entry or deletion can render the system unusable.  If you have any questions regarding this change, do not change anything, but contact a BMC Support Engineer instead for assistance. 

Open the registry editor by clicking on Start | Run in Windows and type in regedit.  Find the following location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\InetInfo\Parameters

At this location, you need to create a new DWORD Value called MaxPoolThreads by right-clicking on Parameters and selecting New|DWORD Value.

Once you create that new value with the name of MaxPoolThreads, double-click the value to enter your desired decimal value (0-4,294,967,295).  However, you should not create more than twenty threads per processor.

  1. IIS Authentication—The IIS web server administrator can enable enhanced authentication. This can have the effect of slowing down all web server activities that run executables, like FootPrints CGI scripts.  If Anonymous Access is disabled and Integrated Windows Authentication is enabled, all scripts require NT login authentication and impact performance adversely.  You can check this setting by right clicking on the web site where the FootPrints virtual directories are set up, selecting Properties, and then selecting the Directory Security tab.
  2. Virtual Memory—This is most important on Windows machines with insufficient memory. You can find the amount of Virtual Memory allocated for swapping when no system memory is available on the Control Panel | System Properties | Virtual Memory tab.  This number should be two to three times the size of the real memory in the system.

Database Settings

  1. SQL Server Debugging—If you turn on SQL server debugging, all SQL server performance will be adversely affected and therefore impacts the performance of FootPrints.

Do not use SQL server debugging/logging unless it is absolutely necessary.  If it is currently enabled, turn it off as soon as possible.

  1. SQL Server Network Access—If you decide to use a SQL database with FootPrints on Windows and the database resides on a different server than FootPrints, you must be certain that the servers have a reliably fast network connection.

By running Microsoft’s Enterprise Manager from the FootPrints server, you can easily compare data access and retrieval speeds.  Compare the time it takes to access the FootPrints database from the FootPrints server verses accessing the data in Enterprise Manager running on the SQL server.  If there is a significant difference in access time between the two servers, this would indicate a potential network or connectivity problem, or a permissions issue.  It is essential to fix the problem before FootPrints is put into production.

These types of speed issues have been discovered on NT/200x servers and have typically been caused by an anti-virus program.  Verify whether an anti-virus program is running on your database server and how thorough the virus scanning heuristics are set.

 

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