EMC® Documentum® Performance Tips
Ten Rapid Checks for Improved EMC Documentum Performance
Monitoring EMC Documentum for Continuous Improvement
September 2012
By Eric Ryder
Senior Consultant, Reveille Documentum Practice
14 years EMC® Documentum® Professional Services
Ensuring EMC Documentum Service Levels
Introduction
This document identifies immediate-impact tips for EMC Documentum performance
improvement. These tips have been field tested and validated from years of hands-on
experience in live production settings.
Also included are suggestions for longer term application monitoring and maintenance. At
Reveille Software, we’re dedicated to ensuring the long-term management and optimization of
EMC applications.
Your EMC Documentum Application Environment is Constantly Changing
EMC Documentum is a capable but complex application platform. During implementation,
deployment, and subsequent production use, the configuration needs to be frequently
modified for:
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Infrastructure changes
Performance tuning
Deploying new applications
Updating applications
Adding on new users and groups
Installing upgrades and patches
There are, in fact, a wide variety of factors that can, and do, lead to on-going modifications to
the original deployment. This impacts performance, resource management, and optimal
configuration. Maintaining optimal performance is an ever-moving target.
A Proper Performance Audit and Engagement Takes Time and Resources
Executed properly, a performance audit can take days or even weeks, depending on the
deployments complexity. Further, several in-house and/or third party resources need to be
involved to get a comprehensive picture of system configuration and performance; this can
include database administrators, network personnel, system administrators, application
developers, support personnel, and Documentum administrators. Finally, proper diagnostic
tools and a deep understanding of how Documentum applications interact with each other is
required to complete the discovery, and recommend solutions.
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The Database team, who are managing other competing priorities, must also be on board.
Database settings need to be investigated, query plans generated, and queries built for
discovery. On the web tier, it takes the proper tools and training to run traces and fine tune
important settings like heap size and configure for load balancing. Typically, customers do not
have these required tools or the ‘know-how’ to use them, and resort to trial and error. From a
networking perspective, the network team must verify and adjust for proper connection speeds
between Documentum components. Often, upon an in-depth investigation at the network
interface or switch level, the configuration settings are not optimal for best performance.
Trial and Error is neither efficient nor cost effective
With a lack of time, resources, and tools, customers often resort to trial and error. They try
many different configuration values, add unnecessary indexes, throw more hardware resources
at the problem, and hope for an improvement. This has three major issues; one, it is not very
productive; two, there is not an empirical way to measure if the trial-and-error process worked
because customers lack objective performance measurement tools; and, three, this is not cost
effective.
Quick Hits: 10 Performance Improvement Tips for EMC
Documentum
There are many settings and parameters that are unique to every Documentum
implementation. A thorough evaluation, including consulting sessions with the various teams,
is required to properly assess and optimize a given implementation. At a high level, what
follows are ten best practices to ensure that you are on your way to optimized performance.
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Performance Setting
If Oracle, make sure cursor_sharing is
set to FORCE or SIMILAR.
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If Oracle, make sure
optimizer_ind_cost_adj is set to 5.
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If Oracle, make sure
optimizer_index_cache is set to 95.
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Make sure heap size is sized properly,
preferably using JMeter, or some
other tool that can show garbage
collection. Typically, -Xms and -Xmx
should be 1024mb.
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If SQL Server, when using SQL Server
for larger volume deployments,
(many millions of rows in
dm_sysobject), the following
parameter settings have been proven
to greatly enhance performance.
Why it is Important
This setting can have a
dramatic effect on how
the optimizer parses
queries.
This setting can have a
varying effect on how the
optimizer parses queries.
What Is Often Found
Default for this setting is
EXACT. This is a poor choice
for Documentum databases.
This setting can have a
dramatic effect on how
the optimizer parses
queries.
Garbage collection has a
huge effect on
performance.
This setting has the biggest
effect on the optimizer. Default
is 0.
These settings can have a
dramatic effect on how
the database handles
queries involving
dm_sysobject.
Default settings for these
parameters are not suitable for
large-volume implementations,
(>10 million objects).
Though there are more
definitive ways to determine
this value, 5 has been
recommended by
Documentum as a good
starting point. Default is 100.
Setting this either too high or
too low will cause excessive
thrashing or too long between
releases of memory.
Max Degree of Parallelism = 4
PARAMETERIZATION = FORCED
AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC =
ON
AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS = OFF
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Performance Setting
Ensure gigabit speeds between all
Documentum servers, including all
network switches in between.
Why it is Important
This affects scale: if you
have a network switch set
to 100mb, it is the weak
link in the chain and
setting it to 1GbE will
make everything 10 times
faster, (relatively
speaking).
What Is Often Found
Often, all network interfaces
(NIC) are set properly to 1GbE,
but a rogue switch somewhere
is set to 100mb. It may only
get saturated at peak times,
making this bottleneck hard to
find. Often the network teams
report that 1GbE is the default,
but somewhere along the line
a change has been made.
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The connection to database storage
should be fiber, or similar speed, and
dedicated.
There is a high volume of
“chatter” between the
Content Server and
database.
Often, the database is just a
server hanging off the network,
like any other server. If there
is not a very fast, preferably
dedicated, pipe between the
CS and DB, there will be a big
impact on query performance.
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CPU and memory usage should be
monitored during "hot" hours, where
there is the highest concurrent user
activity. Sizing should be done to
accommodate peak time.
CPU and memory are set for
average loads and not for peak
load times.
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Document to ACL ratio should be a
high value, such as 100:1.
A maxed out cpu and/or
memory will cause
fluctuating performance
levels. This can affect
jobs, login times,
workflows, etc.
Too many ACL's can cause
performance issues.
Improperly designed
security can lead to
millions of ACL’s. This has
a huge performance
impact when determining
access to documents and
folders.
This is a factor of database
design best practices for
both performance and
backup/restore reasons.
DBA’s don’t always know
where the cut-off point is for
when to partition, or exactly
which tables.
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10 Consider data partitioning for large
repositories, against the largest
Documentum tables, such as
dm_sysobject_s and _r.
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Object-level security is set,
versus folder or user level,
which means at least one ACL
for each document, thereby
creating a huge excess of
ACL’s.
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Longer Term Success: Monitoring Documentum for
Continuous Improvement
It is important to understand your performance before making any of these modifications, and
to have on-going performance monitoring.
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Service Level Baselines: On-going monitoring creates service level baselines so that you
can measure your actual application performance and your actual end-user experience
before you change your system. These baselines also are valuable for understanding
the impact of upgrades, changes, and expansion of your system.
Proactive Management: Monitoring at the application layer allows you to be proactive,
versus reactive, when changes are detected in performance and application behavior.
Objective Trending and Reporting: In terms of continuous improvement, monitoring
allows you to trend your results and continue to make these performance improvement
as you change, expand, virtualize, or add applications to your Documentum platform.
Through proper configuration management and comprehensive Documentum monitoring,
you can optimize service levels and ensure a path of continuous improvement.
Reveille Management Console for Documentum
The Reveille Management Console for Documentum is the only EMC Certified solution for
monitoring actual user experience, application processes and components for Documentum.
This agentless, easy-to-implement solution ensures peak application availability and
performance of your business-critical Documentum applications. Reveille provides capacity and
usage metrics to determine impact of virtualization, hardware and software upgrades, and
Documentum platform upgrades. Reveille is scalable to handle the largest Documentum
implementations, and lowers support costs and reduces trouble tickets.
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Reveille Management Console for Documentum includes:
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Active Documentum Platform Monitoring: Provides for active monitoring of critical
Documentum components and processes. Reveille monitors each of the key
components, assists in isolating the problem when there is an issue, and can
automatically or interactively remediate the issue.
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Comprehensive Documentum Platform coverage: Provides unique visibility and KPI
information for Documentum platform components such as:
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ACS operation and message failures/success
JMS Operation and performance
Content Server total/active sessions and job completion
DFC/DFS interface performance
Virtual and physical Webtop/TaskSpace/D2 (or custom WDK based app)
application status
Webtop/TaskSpace/D2 (or custom WDK based app) user transaction activity and
performance
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Individual Repository checks within HA environment
Actual User Experience Monitoring: Provides you with Documentum application
transaction detail to keep your Documentum Webtop / TaskSpace / DFS / D2 based
users productive by monitoring the actual user response times and application activity
for all users. Supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) based traffic.
Summary
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A trial and error approach to optimize Documentum service levels is neither efficient nor
cost effective, while performance audits following industry best practices should be utilized
periodically to account for complex and dynamic environments that often change to meet
demanding business challenges.
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Effective production monitoring of Documentum is not only necessary, but can be
accomplished with the right solution and set the stage for continuous improvements in
overall application and resource productivity.
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Reveille Management Consoles are being utilized to support content management solutions
in hundreds of large enterprise deployments, including the top 6 financial institutions in the
world. Documentum platform and user activity monitoring across each major computing
environment (such as system test, QA, and production) guarantees high service levels and
the ability to see and resolve issues before end users are impacted.
For more information, download the Reveille Management Console for Documentum datasheet
here.
About Reveille Software
Reveille Software™ is the provider of the most widely used experience and
performance management (EPM) solution for enterprise content management (ECM)
applications. Leveraging patent pending technology in use by hundreds of companies including
Amgen, Nestle and JP Morgan Chase, Reveille EPM helps companies ensure business-critical
applications perform at peak efficiency and availability without application babysitting. Since
2002, Reveille EPM proactively monitors user experience, application processes and business
metrics to diagnose and repair failures before end-users experience delay.
Reveille Software
3820 Mansell Road, Suite T-20
Alpharetta, GA 30022
t. +1 877.897.2579 / f. +1 770.642.2726
reveille.sales@reveillesoftware.com
www.reveillesoftware.com
Copyright © 2012 Reveille Software. All rights reserved.
All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.
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