10.1 Performance on VM

[kgmcveigh]

I am currently migrating Cognos Planning from 8.3 to 10.1.(FP2)
We were under pressure to go with VM's and as a proof of concept had an exact replica of our production environments created in VM's. I restored a copy of production onto these VM's and the users did extensive testing. They saw no decrease in performance at all so we decided to go VM for the upgrade.
We now have 10.1 installed on VM's - same spec as previous production and have migrated everything successfully. What I'm seeing is very poor performance in some areas and acceptable performance in others. For example navigating around the tree in CAC is very slow, similarly when on the web trying to open contributor for an item takes between 15-20 seconds.  Everything is set up the same as in 8.3 - same amount of data. Same config as far as I can see.
So basically 10.1 is running much slower on VM than 8.3 on VM. I'm not sure if 10.1 is just more resource hungry or there may be something we can tweak.
We are looking at getting a consultant in to do a bit of a health check but wanted to check if anybody on here has experienced similar behaviour or can suggest anything??
thanks in advance..

[ericlfg]

Hey,

So a couple things:

1. 8.3 software topology is lighter than the 10.1.1 topology from a services perspective, so there would be a slight performance difference.
2. In 10.1.1 you're using a much heavier client application (Java) vs what you were using in 8.3 (activeX).  First iterations of the java client (8.4) was considerably slower than what we have now in 10.1.1.

Questions:
1. Was the operating system upgraded for this new environment?  If so, what OS are you running and what bit level?
2. Are your IBM cognos services setup identically?
3. What is your exact build of planning?  Go into the CAC > Help > About > 3 dots bottom right corner.

[kgmcveigh]

Hey Eric,
1. For the upgrade we moved to Windows Server 2008 R2 ( SP1 ) 64-bit. ( I realise now I have made no allowance for this in the spec!!) 
2. Services and everything else set up exactly the same
3. version detail is -

Install 10.1.6302.18 EN
Build EPCONTRIBUTORADMIN: 10.1.4029.0

I have the option to bump up the memory and processing power on the VM - so we may need to play with a bit.
thanks for the reply

[ericlfg]

With the confirmation of the OS being upgraded to a 64bit release, there is going to be overhead with running the 10.1.1 EP software since it's a 32bit application.  This shouldn't be huge, but this overhead coupled with a heavier install could add up to a few seconds here and there.

As for modifying the RAM and CPU for the VMs, before making any changes, open task manager and see how much RAM is already being used.  As a general rule of thumb you want to have about 2GB per processor (on job server machines); however, this isn't always necessary -- you just want to make sure that there is adequate memory available so processes don't start paging to disk.

[kgmcveigh]

So - I've bumped up the memory on the app and database server. When anyone goes into contributor it is still quite slow to open the items in the tree on the left hand side ( sorry don't know the right names here but it's just basically our org structure right down to project ). In 8.3 this tree expanded instantaneously but now its taking maybe 3 or 4 seconds after each click. I don't see this as a big deal but the users and testers are complaining about it a lot. During this operation I don't see any stress on the server at all so I'm wondering is there some other setting in cognos as opposed to the OS than can be tuned to help this?

thanks again all.

[ericlfg]

Hey there,

So in the 10.1 release there was a modification made to the elist workflow (the list of the hierarchies end user's expand and select their elist items from).  The change was to make the expansion of the hierarchies dynamic, that is, downloaded when selected.  The way it worked previously was that the entire structure was downloaded before anything was displayed, this means the initial display took longer.  You can change this back to the original configuration for each application by going into the adminoption table in the application database.

1. Locate the row titled WORKFLOWPAGE_DOWNLOAD_ON_DEMAND
2. Change the optionvalue from 1 to 0 (zero).
3. GTP the application.
*Note: backup the application database prior to making this change, for disaster recovery purposes (and / or test in a dev / QA environment first)

[kgmcveigh]

that works perfectly!! once again many thanks.

[ericlfg]

Great to hear, glad to help. :)