Increasing scheduled reporting capacity

All Crystal reports that are scheduled are eventually processed by a Report Job Server. You can expand Crystal Enterprise by running individual Report Job Servers on multiple machines, or by running multiple Report Job Servers on a single multi-processor machine.

If the majority of your reports are scheduled to run on a regular basis, there are several strategies you can adopt to maximize your system's processing capacity:

• Install the Report Job Server in close proximity to (but not on the same machine as) the database server against which the reports run. Ensure also that the File Repository Servers are readily accessible to all Report Job Servers (so they can read report objects from the Input FRS and write report instances to the Output FRS quickly). Depending upon your network configuration, these strategies may improve the Report Job Server's processing speeds, because there is less distance for data to travel over your corporate network.
• Verify the efficiency of your reports. When designing reports in Crystal Reports, there are a number of ways in which you can improve the performance of the report itself, by modifying record selection formulas, using the database server's resources to group data, incorporating parameter fields, and so on. For more information, see the "Designing Optimized Web Reports" section in the Crystal Reports User's Guide (version 8.5 and later).
• Use event-based scheduling to create dependencies between large or complex reports. For instance, if you run several very complex reports on a regular, nightly basis, you can use Schedule events to ensure that the reports are processed sequentially. This is a useful way of minimizing the processing load that your database server is subject to at any given point in time.
• If some reports are much larger or more complex than others, consider distributing the processing load through the use of server groups. For instance, you might create two server groups, each containing one or more Report Job Servers. Then, when you schedule recurrent reports, you can specify that it be processed by a particular server group to ensure that especially large reports are distributed evenly across resources.
• Increase the hardware resources that are available to a Report Job Server. If the Report Job Server is currently running on a machine along with other Crystal Enterprise components, consider moving the Report Job Server to a dedicated machine. If the new machine has multiple CPUs, you can install multiple Report Job Servers on the same machine (typically no more than one service/daemon per CPU).