EMC World 2015 – Day 2 at Momentum

Second day in this amazing event. There are not only general and presentation sessions you can also participate on a so called “Hands-on Lab”. The subject was the “EMC Documentum Platform Performance Tuning”. So learning by doing is also a good opportunity you can use at Momentum to enhance your skills.

The session covered the performance tuning using Fiddler for the HTTP requests, the DFC trace, sql traces and how to use the related execution plan, and at the end, how to tune xPlore but only for the ingestion phase meaning the indexing of the documents.The tuning of the fulltext search was not addressed.

Most of the tips I learned was on the xPlore side, which parameters to set to increase the performances or to avoid some errors due timeouts for instance. I skipped more or less the Database tuning, why? that’s not acceptable would you say. Because we have the experts at dbi service to do this kind of tuning!

So let’s me give you some information.

DFC trace
In df.properties add :
dfc.tracing.enable=true
dfc.tracing.verbose=true
dfc.tracing.max_stack_deph=0
dfc.tracing.include_rpcs=true
dfc.tracing.mode=compact
dfc.tracing.include_session_id=true
dfc.tracing=c:dctmtrace
dfc.tracing.enable can be set from false to true and after a couple of seconds the trace file will be created. Of course once the value is set to false, the tracing is stopped.

xPlore tuning
I would recommend to rely to the documentation but here you can find some tips:

• disable fulltext for a specific format by setting can_index=false
• filter which document is not indexed by excluding cabinets or folder or even document types
• reduce the online rebuild index max queue size
• reduce the number of indexing threads and CPS request threads
• reduce the number of documents processed simultaneously by the CPS internal processing queue
• increase the number of CPS daemon processes

WARNING: each parameter can have some drawbacks, so take care when you change this values

So this was on a lab, let’s apply this on real case at customer sites!