Memory settings for default Alfresco+TomCat installations

[kevinr]

FYI… The default memory settings for the Alfresco+Tomcat bundles are very low - they are using the JVM default of 64MB unless you explicity set it to another value.

We suggest that you change the JAVA_OPTS variable to increase the memory to 512mb or greater depending on your machine specifications. We also suggest that you run with the "-server" option on unix machines.

Windows:
Edit the following line (approx line 95) in the 'catalina.bat' file to change the maximum JVM size to 512MB.
set JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx512m

Unix:
Add the following line below to the beginning of the 'catalina.sh' file to change the maximum JVM size to 512MB.
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xmx512m"

Or just define an environment variable JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx512m

This significantly improves the performance of Alfresco on TomCat.

You should find that JBoss installations on windows are already set to use 512mb by default, you may also wish to check your linux jboss installations if applicable.

Thanks,

The Alfresco Team

[omegerard]

I can confirm that not only does this improve performance, it also makes Alfresco stable (again): no more "out-of-heap" space errors any longer.

Having said that, I must still report that access to the CIFS interface of Alfresco is slower than access to standard network drives.

Would it help to increase the memory size to 1gb?

Or can I expect better performance on a server with more CPU power?

[kevinr]

Glad to hear it's improved the performance (and stability!) We should never have shipped the bundles without a setting of at least 256MB, with 512MB being recommended. Appologies for that mistake.

The CIFS protocol is quite CPU intensive at the moment, so yes a server with more powerful CPU will probably help more than more memory, but if you have a 1GB to spare then it will help some. We will be working on a round of performance improvements for CIFS in a later release.

Thanks,

Kevin

[omegerard]

Thanks for the response.

This issue has lost some of its urgency since I noticed that the webdav interface allows drag&drop operations. On the laptop I'm using, I work on W2K and, incidentally, in the webdav interface I cannot drag and drop files. Is that the normal behaviour of webdav on W2K? Or do I have to switch on an (obscure) property/feature?