Improving web response speeds

Because all user interaction with Crystal Enterprise occurs over the Web, you may need to investigate a number of areas to determine exactly where you can improve web response speeds. These are some common aspects of your deployment that you should consider before deciding how to expand Crystal Enterprise:

• Assess your web server's ability to serve the number of users who connect regularly to Crystal Enterprise. Use the administrative tools provided with your web server software (or with your operating system) to determine how well your web server performs. If the web server is indeed limiting web response speeds, consider increasing the web server's hardware and/or setting up a "web farm" (multiple web servers responding to web requests to a single IP address). To configure Crystal Enterprise for use in a web farm environment, see the Crystal Enterprise Installation Guide.
• If web response speeds are slowed only by report viewing activities, see Choosing between live and saved data and Increasing on-demand viewing capacity.
• Take into account the number of users who regularly access your system. If you are running a large deployment, ensure that you have set up an APS cluster. For details, see Increasing overall system capacity.

If you find that a single Web Component Server (WCS) inadequately services the number of scripting requests made by users who access your system on a regular basis, consider the following options:

• Increase the hardware resources that are available to the Web Component Server (WCS). If the WCS is currently running on the web server, or on a single machine with other Crystal Enterprise components, consider moving the WCS to a dedicated machine. If the new machine has multiple CPUs, you can install multiple WCS services/daemons on the same machine (typically no more than one per CPU).
• Set up two (or more) WCS machines to take advantage of the dynamic load balancing that is built into the Web Connector components. The Web Connector distributes the processing load evenly across WCS hosts: each new Crystal Enterprise session is sent to the least used WCS. This also provides you with the benefits of being able to take one WCS machine offline for service, without bringing down the entire system.

Note:    If you are running Apache as your web server, you must instruct Apache to reinitialize its child worker processes after you add or remove WCSHOSTS to the Web Connector configuration files. You can generally do this with one of the following commands:

kill -HUP `cat <absolute path to httpd.pid file>`
kill -USR1 `cat <absolute path to httpd.pid file>`

Consult the Apache documentation for more information.