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). See Configuring your web farm for load balancing.
• If web response speeds are slowed only by report viewing activities, see Increasing scheduled reporting capacity 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 a CMS cluster. For details, see Increasing overall system capacity.

If you find that a single application server (that is, the WCS or the Java web application server) 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 application server. If the application server is currently running on the web server, or on a single machine with other Crystal Enterprise components, consider moving the application server to a dedicated machine. If the new machine has multiple CPUs, you can install multiple WCS services/daemons or Java application servers on the same machine (typically no more than one per CPU).
• If you are using the default Windows installation of Crystal Enterprise, 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.
• If you are using the UNIX installation of Crystal Enterprise (or have configured your Windows installation to use the Crystal Enterprise Java SDK), consider setting up two (or more) Java application servers. Consult the documentation for your Java web application server for information on load-balancing, clustering, and scalability.

  Note:    Crystal Enterprise does not support the session-replication functionality provided by some Java web application servers.