Alfresco Performance and Use

[athir_gillani]

Dear All,

Please guide me on the following points. I have been facing performance issues on production system.

1. Can I use Alfresco to content management on my production systems. For example, I have a huge number property files, icons, backgrounds and javascript and css files. My system has a huge load in terms of users hence this content is accessed in thousands of times in 1 minute. Is alfresco best suited to manage and deliver this kind of content.

How can I optimize it for best performance.

2. What should be the architecture of the system, I have 8 servers in production, each of them has its own alfresco installed, But there is one common database entertaining all of the these alfresco instantiations.
What do alfresco save in database, index or content also. What is the best option to optimize alfresco.

3. What are other areas that I can look to analyze alfresco for performance. Alresco scheduler are there, which I do not understand in great depth, how I can optimize them, keep the scheduled jobs which are required and remove the rest of them.


Is it possible to get Alfresco official consultancy to review the performance.

[mrogers]

Yes just give alfresco a call.   The consultants will help.

Yes alfresco is suited to managing content.   That's what it does and there are hundreds of thousands of sites doing it.

With Wcm it may be that files like CSS, JavaScript and icons can and should be cached in front of alfresco.   That's fairly commonly done.

[athir_gillani]

Thanks a lot for your answer.

So, I now understand that Alfresco is suitable for content management, which has high demand of availability. But currently the time to access one resource is too high. How can I configure Alfresco for best performance, share some document if there are any available. There are a lot of scheduled jobs in alfresco, please share with me some document that I can use to optimize for performance. I want to keep the scheduled jobs which are required and remove the rest of them.

We already have a cache mechanism enabled over it. Can you suggest me what would be an appropriate time for caching a resource. Currently I have configured it to 5 minutes. I am planning to raise it to at least 1 hour. I understand that Alfresco do not support an inbuilt cache, can I configure cache over Alfresco such that new resource is requested and cached as soon as a resource is updated.

Can you please elaborate the following questions also:
1. What is your opinion about multiple Alfresco installed on multiple servers, while only one database server supporting it. What is exactly saved in the database, is it only the index or also the physical files saved in the database.

[mrogers]

I doubt it's worth worrying about the scheduled jobs have you got any specific concerns?

Why is the time to access one resource too high.  Do you have figures ?

For stuff that doesn't change (e.g CSS or js). Cache it for a long time or until your cache is full.   Some Urls cant be cached.  But many, even the content urls can be.

A cluster of eight alfresco servers is a huge install.   You would probably be better off starting with say 3 instances and then tuning those up.  Once that's going well then add more cluster nodes if that's what your load requires.