Technology Blogs by Members
Explore a vibrant mix of technical expertise, industry insights, and tech buzz in member blogs covering SAP products, technology, and events. Get in the mix!
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
petr_solberg
Active Contributor

Update 24th September 2013

Well, it seems I am not the only one to notice that Software Catalogue and Products Catalogue in the SLD takes a

long long time to open and gets worse and the number of Products and Software Components grows, because,

SAP have released and OSS Note with a Patch for the SLD which will speed up the loading time when opening

the Software Catalogue and the Product Catalogue in the SLD UI.

This is the OSS Note:

OSS 1901284 - Performance optimization in loading of Software/Product Catalog in SLD UI

Introduction:


The SLD is the unsung hero of the SAP Landscape, sitting there, behind the scenes, serving some of the most mission critical SAP components, SLD itself being mission critical.

If you run SLD in a Production PI scenario then the chances are you'll be following SAP's Best Practice recommendation of hosting the Central RunTime Production SLD on the Production PI system and the Design Time SLD normally on the non-Production PI, alternatively you may have a standalone Production Central RunTime SLD.

The Customer where I am currently engaged has the classical SAP recommended design with the PI scenario and Central Runtime SLD running on the Production PI system.

We had a situation last week where it was reported that the SLD in Prod is very slow.

As we all know, SLD is depended on, critically, by

      . Integration scenarios in PI  (Business system names for receiver determination, Business system

       mapping rules, Product and software component names and versions, E2E monitoring definitions,

       Adapter configuration cache)

      . NWDI / NWDS (Object name reservation, Storage of development configurations, Product and software
       component names and versions)

     . Portal/BI Portal/CE Webdynpros (resolve adaptive Rfc calls)

     . Integration scenarios/proxies spanning ERP/CE/PI/SNC

     . CE Xapps applications


I was asked to investigate and solve the slow SLD.

Having received a report that the Central RunTime SLD was slow, the first thing I did was quickly try to qualify and quantify, how slow is the SLD ? How to check that, how to measure that, so many tools available, what would be the most meaningful, quickest and most visible ?

I opted for a simple solution to check the Central RunTime SLD Performance, I simply wanted to as a benchmark compare Dev Design Time SLD and Prod Runtime SLD, in the first instance. Dev Design Time SLD was not receiving complaints and therefore meeting the acceptable minimum performance, therefore a simple benchmark visible metric of the performance of Prod would be to compare Prod and Dev.

I opted for a drag race, head to head, the Production PI RunTime SLD against the Development PI Design Time SLD, the drag race would work as follows:

     . Open Web Browser and Logon to Prod PI RunTime SLD http://Server:Port/sld

     . Open Web Browser and Logon to Dev PI Design Time SLD http://Server:Port/sld

     . Have both Internet Explorers visible on the screen

     . As quickly as humanly possible, in both Web Browsers click the 'Software Components' link in the

     Software Catalogue area... and see which one opens first and how long it takes...

                            

   

In my experience in terms of SLD activities, you'll know this if you've created Software Components for NWDI/NWDS, opening the Software

Catalogue in the SLD is one of the most time consuming actions.

So, back to the test, we now have a drag race on our screen, the Prod Runtime SLD against the Dev Design Time SLD, and the number of Software Components objects in both systems is quite similar.

In my test, Dev came across the finish line first, the Software Components page appeared a full couple of minutes before Prod got to the finish line. This is really bad and clearly there was a problem. To solve the problem I did an emergency full O/S DB Java tuning/performance review of the Prod Central RunTime SLD and as a result following corrective actions, the Prod RunTime SLD was back winning the drag race against the Dev Design Time SLD.

All's well that ends well.

Then To The Point Of This Blog:

The whole activity got me wondering, SLD is for most people an invisible component, it's like the air we breathe we take it for granted, but if it's not there, very little in our NetWeaver landscape will work.

Most Customers invest a lot of time and money giving performance to ECC, Portal, PI etc but it's quite rare that focus is given to the Central RunTime SLD.

We know the Central RunTime SLD is doing a lot of work, one example, everytime a Portal WebDynPro is executed an Adaptive RFC call is made to the SLD and there are more such examples.

Have we ever included the Central RunTime SLD in E2E Trace, or Load Runner Testing, installing NetWeaver Probes and DB probes and O/S probes on the SLD to see the overhead for the SLD in the whole solution ? I've not seen such attention given to SLD.

But still it is there and necessary.

And what performance of SLD can be considered as average, what performance of SLD can be considered as poor, what performance of SLD can be considered as good and what performance of SLD can be considered as excellent ? And how to benchmark the performance of the SLD ?

And so, the drag race I performed for my quick SLD performance analysis got me wondering, wouldn't it be interesting, using the power of the SCN Community, for everybody who is interested to take part, to execute this simple SLD benchmark performance test on their Production RunTime SLD and report back using
the blog comments how long it took to open the Software Catalog. We would then have a list of results, and all of us could see how our Production RunTime SLD's are performing compared to other installations in the wider community.

With the resulting data,

     . we can then see how our SLD's are doing

     . we can examine, the entities with the fastest results, if they are willing to share, what setup they have, to

     achieve such results

     . we can continue a blogging series focussing on SLD and getting the best performance out of the SLD

     . we can learn more about the SLD, the unsung hero of the NetWeaver landscape

     . if we're lucky, we might get some experts from SAP SLD area giving feedback

This blog is entitled, 'Seasonal Fun: SLD Drag Racing', then,  as a race, as a competition, what will the prize be ?

     The journey is the destination, the prize will be, taking part and learning more about the SLD.

Interested to join in and take part in this competition ?

     Do this:

        

          1, Open Internet Explorer

          2, Logon to SLD http://Server:Port/sld

          3, Click Software Catalogue and record the time how long it takes the Software Catalogue to open

          4, (if you have HTTPWatch it will be even better, because you can most accurately record the results and timing)

          5, Post the results in the comments section of this blog

       

          6, Make clear how many Software Components you have, obviously this will impact runtime

                                

n.b. for reasons of accuracy please use Internet Explorer, because some browsers are faster than
others and we need to be sure we are keeping as close to a scientific standard as possible and
to eliminate any chance that the browsers skew the results

My Results:

     Production Central Runtime SLD - running on PI or Standalone ? PI 7.1.1

  

     Number of Software Components ? ~15,000

     Time taken to open Software Catalogue ? 106 seconds

If there is enough interest in this, we can look to do similar Drag Racing in other components, for example, Portal, opening the WebDynPro Content Administration and others.


Looking forward to some interesting research.

All the best,

Andy Silvey.

p.s. make sure to checkout the SAP NetWeaver Basis Administrator's Toolbox Wiki, and if you have your favourite OSS Notes and doco and it's not listed there, add it to the list http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Community/Andy+Silvey%27s.......SAP+NetWeaver+Basis+Administrat...

Labels in this area