Slow Performance in FormsIVS on LC ES Update 1 (8.2.1)

[gbryu916]

Hi. I'm noticing slower performance inside FormsIVS and OutputIVS tests on LC ES 8.2.1.  I'm using the same XDP and XML so the the input files are controlled.  I'm upgrading from LC 7.2 (Windows 2003) to a LC ES 8.2.1 (Solaris 10) platform.  I test the files against FormsIVS/OutputIVS and I'm seeing much slower performance on LC ES 8.2.1 even though it is on newer hardware.  I'm seeing results that takes twice as long to get the same output.  What could be the reason for the performance problems?  Thank you.

Old Environment:

LC 7.2 Forms, Windows 2003, WebLogic 8.1 SP5

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 7.2 sec

FormsIVS (PDF) = 9.6 sec

Future Environment:

LC ES 8.2.1 Forms, Solaris 10, WebLogic 10.0 MP2, Oracle 10.2.0.4

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 16.4 sec

OutputIVS (PDF) = 42 sec

[gbryu916]

I wanted to update this ticket, so people know about a Sun T series performance problem with LiveCycle.  I received a response back from Adobe LiveCycle support in regards to my problems.  The answer is that the Sun T series of servers (T2000, T5120, T5240) are slow for general usage.  The T series are newer lines of servers.  I learned about the slow test from this URL http://forums.adobe.com/thread/536779?tstart=0 where an Adobe product manager stated T series have performance issues.  Hope this helps someone in the future.

Old Environment:

HP DL360, 2 CPU 3.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM

LC 7.2 Forms, Windows 2003 (32-bit), WebLogic 8.1 SP5 (32-bit), Sun JDK 1.4.2_08 (32-bit)

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 7.2 sec

FormsIVS (PDF) = 9.6 sec

Tested Environment Configurations:

Sun SunFire T2000, 8 CPU 1.2 GHz, 6 GB RAM

LC ES 8.2.1 Forms, Solaris 10 (64-bit), WebLogic 10.0 MP2 (32-bit), Sun JDK 1.5.0_15 (32-bit), Oracle 10.2.0.4

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 16.4 sec

OutputIVS (PDF) = 42 sec

- Adobe documentation shows that Solaris 10, WebLogic 10 combination should be 64-bit.  I moved to WL 9.2 MP3 to allow me to use a 32-bit combination since I didn't have a WL 10.0 MP2 (64-bit) installer available.

Sun T5120, 30 CPU 1.4 GHz, 6 GB RAM

LC ES 8.2.1 Forms, Solaris 10 (64-bit), WebLogic 9.2 MP3 (32-bit), Sun JDK 1.5.0_12 (32-bit), Oracle 10.2.0.4

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 17.2 sec

OutputIVS (PDF) = 32 sec

Sun Fire V490, 20 CPU 1.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM

LC ES 8.2.1 Forms, Solaris 10 (64-bit), WebLogic 9.2 MP3 (32-bit), Sun JDK 1.5.0_12 (32-bit), Oracle 10.2.0.4

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 8.8 sec

OutputIVS (PDF) = 21.7 sec

- The V490 is an older box from 2004/2005 and it outperformed the current T5120 in terms of the LC ES IVS tests.

HP xw4200, 2 CPU 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM

LC ES 8.2.1 Forms, Windows XP (32-bit), WebLogic 9.2. MP3 (32-bit), BEA JRockit 1.5.0_12, Oracle 10.2..0.4

FormsIVS (PDFForm) = 4.2 sec

OutputIVS (PDF) = 10.1 sec

- A development Windows workstation shows the same performance as the current LC 7.2 environment.

[Gardner_Buchana]

Although the Sun T-Series systems have good aggregate performance for certain applications -- like web servers -- they deliver this performance via a huge number of virtual CPUs.  A T5140 (UltraSPARC T2+) has 128 virtual CPUs.  For an application that is mostly single-threaded, you will only see the performance of one core and on a  T2+ this is not particularly fast, even compared to an UltraSPARC III.  Where you will see this system shine is if you are doing many concurrent Forms renders.  A properly built application should scale to up to around 100 cuncurrent requests on this system, and still deliver reponse times similar to what you got single-threaded.

Whatever single-threaded response time you get is, however, going to be the absolute fastest you will get any single request.  If response time, especially response time to a relatively small number of concurrent requests is your goal, you are quite unlikely to find UltraSPARC T2+ systems a good fit for your application.

[Gardner_Buchana]

7 seconds is quite a long render time for a form.  It must be quite large and complex to require this amount of time.  Can you describe it in terms of number of pages, type of content and final size?

It is likely not being cached.  Can you outline the factors that prevent it from being cached?  Have you tried to adjust it to allow render caching?

What measures have you taken to optimise the form for better render performance?

[gbryu916]

Hi. Thank you for your reply. That 7 second render is with the IVS performance tests. I believe IVS renders it 20 times and gives you the total time, so I don't think it takes that long. It's a 2 page XDP template, so I don't think it's complex. The XDP file size is 504 KB when saved in the old Adobe LC Designer 7.1 and 408 KB when saved in Adobe LC Designer 8.2.1.

Cache? Not sure. I'm a beginner to the LC administration so any tuning suggestions would be appreciated. My project's LC Designer template programmers haven't done performance tuning with their templates, so I don't know the answer to that one.