New Alfresco fresh Installations with very poor performance

[irvinloc]

Hi all,
I'm a newcomer to Alfresco. I need some kind of solution of this kind to support document management for my company. I love Alfresco's features versioning documents, searching, customizations, team working, workflows, etc but i'm dissapointed with the overall performance I've experienced (surelly is my fault, although I have tried to absorb all the information available in foros, wikis, blogs, official docs, etc)
I've tested several Community versions (all 4.2.x versions) in an HP Proliant DL360p Gen8 with Intel Xeon 2 GHz, 8G Ram, 1.5T HD, in virtualizad and not virtualized environment, with Ubuntu and Windows. Also I've tested on desktop machines.

The results, with fresh new installations, are not promissing (with all resources at my hands):
-the starting time of tomcat is between  2 and 4 min  (I've seen videos from ECM4U on Alfresco Summit 2013: Alfresco Virtual Appliance an others in which all the system from ubuntu starting is up in a few seconds). I've installed it from the bundle without any customization on JVM or Tomcat, with the default PostgreSql. Is there anything I can tweak there?
-The development and testing cycle timings are frustrating(because of tomcat restarting times)
-Office documents preview is erratic
-After several days on without user activity, the system is unstable and error prone. I have to reinitialize to continue using it
-search is erratic: some times it runs ok, some times it don't find anything (not even searching by document title).
-response times navegating through the documents is annoying (compared to, for example, accessing OpenERP filled with data via VPN!)


certainly something I'm doing wrong, because if everyone had the same user experience Alfresco would not have the success it has.
My questions are:
-what is the normal starting time of tomcat in a fast machine? (Alfresco and Share in the same Tomcat)
-Is anything wrong with my hardware?
-Is anything wrong with the default installation bundles?
-Is Enterprise version better than Community version in user experience / performance?
-Is there any Dummies´Guide I can follow to reach better performances?
-Any ideas on virtualized environment performance?

[irvinloc]

…Tomcat logs

[mrogers]

Don't test anything except 4.2.e.

A few minutes start up time is normal especially for the first time alfresco is run which is initializing the databases.   

When developing you shouldn't need to restart tomcat at all.   For example if you are developing in share then stick it on its own tomcat so you don't restart the repo each time.  And if you are developing alfresco repository code then "hot deploy code.   

-Office documents preview is erratic - that's not expected.
-After several days on without user activity, the system is unstable and error prone. I have to reinitialize to continue using it - That's not right either.
-search is erratic: some times it runs ok, some times it don't find anything (not even searching by document title) - or that.

-Is anything wrong with my hardware?    Its unlikely but possible
-Is anything wrong with the default installation bundles?  Its tuned for a small company, you may want to configure more resources
-Is Enterprise version better than Community version in user experience / performance?   Should be fairly similar.
-Any ideas on virtualized environment performance?  Don't make the JVM page in and out.    Make sure there's enough RAM.   Beware of what's running on the other virtual instances.

May be worth checking your network settings and whether there's anything else hogging resources.

[mrogers]

Don't test anything except 4.2.e.

A few minutes start up time is normal especially for the first time alfresco is run which is initializing the databases.   

When developing you shouldn't need to restart tomcat at all.   For example if you are developing in share then stick it on its own tomcat so you don't restart the repo each time.  And if you are developing alfresco repository code then "hot deploy code.   

-Office documents preview is erratic - that's not expected.
-After several days on without user activity, the system is unstable and error prone. I have to reinitialize to continue using it - That's not right either.
-search is erratic: some times it runs ok, some times it don't find anything (not even searching by document title) - or that.

-Is anything wrong with my hardware?    Its unlikely but possible
-Is anything wrong with the default installation bundles?  Its tuned for a small company, you may want to configure more resources
-Is Enterprise version better than Community version in user experience / performance?   Should be fairly similar.
-Any ideas on virtualized environment performance?  Don't make the JVM page in and out.    Make sure there's enough RAM.   Beware of what's running on the other virtual instances.

May be worth checking your network settings and whether there's anything else hogging resources.

[irvinloc]

Thanks, mrogers,
Regarding other virtual instances, the virtual machine in which runs Alfresco is the only VM in the hypervisor (I'm switching between Windows Server 2008 / Ubuntu Server 12.04, but only one of them is started at a certain time). All server resources given to it.
I suspect the bottleneck may be the hard drive performance (3x1TB in RAID 3) , because CPU and RAM are not reaching high levels of use.
Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but when I see videos, from Alfresco Summits mainly, I envy the performance they achieve.

I have to dig JVM / multi tomcat environments as per your suggestions,

Many thanks once again,

[mrogers]

The other thing you may be suffering from is the database needing to gather stats.     Especially if you are just spinning up an instance and testing it.    Postgress does this automatically overnight but if you are shutting down the VM or just spinning up a new instance and loading with data then database can require a little TLC.