Very Slow Performance of Cognos 8.4.0

[cognos.monster]

Hello,

I would like to seek help on how can i make our Cognos 8.4.0 setup perform fast.  It takes 2-4 mins (depends on which report i run) for my reports to be presented.  The report consists of multiple crosstabs (2-3 queries).  I only have 2 years data which is roughly 10GB.

What do i need to do to make it run faster.

1. Server Level optimization
2. Database Level optimization
3. Framework Level optimization
4. Report Level optimization

Cognos 8 BI Server
===============
-Windows 2003 Server  Enterprise 64-bit
-16 GB RAM
- used large config for Cognos 4GB

Database Server
===============
-Windows 2003 Standard 32-bit
-8GB RAM
-MS SQL Server 2005

[sir_jeroen]

Hi Monster,

Have you identified what your bottleneck is? Is it your Database server or is it the Cognos server?
First you'll have to identify the bottleneck.
So start a report and see how the cognos server and the db-server are performing....
If you know that then you can take a better look....
Secondly: It's nice for your db server to have 8 gb but unfortunately 4gb is wasted... W2003 Standard can only address up to 4GB of memory. And of this 4 GB a maximum of 3GB can be used for worker processes (/PAE option). So upgrade your db server to Enterprise edition (less favorite) or x64 (my favorite).

Good luck...

[cognos.monster]

Hi Addict,

It seems that whats slow is the Cognos Server... I am looking forward in how to tweak my Server along with Cognos application itself.  I have read and applied several steps on how to tweak my server but it seems not to be taking any significant change in performance of my reports.

[sir_jeroen]

If I understand correctly your cognos server is stressing out. When slow is it High CPU usage or RAM usage?
What is the disk activity and how big are the files in your temp directory <c8 install>/temp?
How many concurrent users do you have?
what kind of reports do you have? Crosstabs or Lists?