ServiceDesk

 View Only

Improving Servicedesk and Workflow Login Performance 

Nov 02, 2012 01:21 PM

One of the concerns and complaints of using Servicedesk and Workflow has been the long amount of time it takes to log into ProcessManager. Sometimes it can take just a short period of time, and, as was discovered recently, it can take upwards of two hours, before a login will be successfully completed. Most users are not patient enough, (not that they should be either...) to wait that long and so to them it appears as though they cannot log into the portal. It will take their credentials, but the login never completes. And it does not seem matter whether active directory credentials or native portal credentials are used.

Amongst a variety of things happening when the users attempt to login, is that each time a user logins in, if he has a existing open session, that is read and cached. Or a new one is created. And by default, all sessions that are stored are all read and cached during that same login event. In environments such as a load-balanced one, where more than 300-400 users may have simultaneous open web and processmanager sessions, in addition to those that are maintained for users not in the system but have process information that needs to be maintained, this can be a large number. Recently, one such environment was discovered to have over 10k of open sessions.

This is just something that is not necessary for day-to-day Servicedesk or large workflow server configurations. To verify the number of open ProcessManager sessions in SYMQ, open a DOS prompt and follow the steps below:

  1. Browse and open ...\Symantec\Workflow\Designer\Tools\lmc.exe
  2. At the lmc> prompt, type: open lme://127.0.0.1/LBME.ProcessManagerSessions
  3. Type Count
  4. This will display the number of open ProcessManagerSessions in that queue.

The results should not be large. Numbers over 10k are definitely too large. No matter what number you find, all of those sessions are getting cached when users attempt to log in.

Since it is not necessary to cache this information when accessing the portal, fortunately there is a SYMQ queue configuration item that will allow you to turn this off. This will improve performance for all endusers. If you were wondering, this does not have any negative functional effect on the use of the portal. This has a net effect of allowing users to log in to the portal quicker.

To stop the caching of the ProcessManagerSessions, a SYMQ needs to be reconfigured as follows:

  1. Open up the Log Viewer or other tool that displays the SYMQ Configuration Tab
  2. Highlight the Symq_Local_Defaults SYMQ configuration.
  3. Now find the "local.ensemble.credentials" queue
  4. Highlight it and click on the Edit button.
  5. The edit exchange dialog will open. Find, under the Cache Config heading, the Init Procedure item.
  6. Change its setting from the default value of LoadFromSource to DoNotLoad
  7. Click the OK, then click Save.
  8. Restart Server Extensions

See the graphic below for reference. If you make these changes, you should se a big improvement in how your portal functions during login.

Statistics
0 Favorited
0 Views
0 Files
0 Shares
0 Downloads

Tags and Keywords

Comments

Apr 29, 2013 11:43 AM

Hi Lark,

This has been already included in a future release.  You can expect to see this in the 7.5 Workflow release scheduled for the fall of 2013.

 

Thanks for reviewing this!

Apr 29, 2013 12:08 AM

BRING - do you know if this will be implemented in a future version by default?

Related Entries and Links

No Related Resource entered.