Performance in the Portal

[Former Member]

This note is for my reference, but I'm making it public in case it's of any value to others..  Let me first state that I'm not a Basis guru.  I'm a developer..

Several times over the past couple of years I have encountered performance issues in the portal when releasing heavily used ABAP WebDynpro applications for prime time.  What I mean by heavily used:  applications which may be accessed concurrently by 300 to 400 users throughout the day.  Whether the portal environment is single server node or multiple, the following seems to apply.  The most recent portal environment consisted of 3 server nodes sharing 8GB of memory.

Symptom:  As more and more users start accessing the application within the portal, the performance gets slower and slower to the point where frustration sets in and the help desk begins receiving calls.

Out of the box the SAP portal sets the following system values as default:

MaxThreadCount = 200

InitialThreadCount = 100

MinThreadCount = 50

In my experience, regardless of server nodes, if you are anticipating 300 to 400 users concurrently, you have to increase the following:

MaxThreadCount = 300  (or perhaps even more depending on your memory, etc..)

Again, this is from my experience and just my observations.  I wanted to get it documented, somewhat just for my own library, but also in case it helps others.  This is the third time I've had to be involved with performance issues that were all resolved by increasing this value.