FOTOWEB 6.0 Reference Manual - FotoWare

Factors affecting system performance
Factor Comments
Processor speed The processor speed directly influences how many pages
FotoWeb can produce every second.
Disk systems FotoWeb frequently writes to and reads from the disk caches.
The speed of the local disk system will therefore affect the
performance of FotoWeb. A striped disk system will give best
performance, and can be used since the caches do not contain
valuable data.
The network speed The speed of the network connection between your servers is
crucial to the performance of FotoWeb. The network access to the
file server and how fast the disk systems can deliver data is
crucial to FotoWeb performance.
The speed of the Index Manager The responsiveness of your Index Manager server has a large
server influence on FotoWeb. It does not affect the processor usage, but
has a large effect on the number of requests FotoWeb can handle
per second. Running Index Manager on the same server as
FotoWeb is not recommended except in small workgroups.
Placement of the document store Index Manager will need more time to search and update the
indexes if the documents are indexed over the network. It is
therefore recommended that Index Manager runs on the same
server as the file shares for the document store.
Internet connection speed If your users access FotoWeb over the Internet, the available
bandwidth will to a large degree decide the responsiveness of the
system.
Server hardware
If your hardware platform is under dimensioned, FotoWeb will not be able to respond to your users’
requests as fast as they expect. Your users will not work as effectively as possible, or in the worst case not
be able to use your system at all. The main factors that decide the load that your FotoWeb server can
handle is listed below, in order of importance:
Factor Comments
Processor speed Processor speed in GHz and number of processors
Available memory The available memory, speed of the memory and the amount
allocated to FotoWeb caches.
Network speed How fast FotoWeb can communicate with other servers that hold
documents and indexes
IO speed How fast FotoWeb can write to and read from the local disks.
Choosing correct hardware is crucial to FotoWeb performance. You should therefore reserve time to
plan your investments. If you expect your system to grow, it may be wise to invest in hardware that is
expandable, e.g. by adding more processors or memory when that is needed by the system.
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