Monday, September 18, 2006

Tuning Alfresco on Sun Fire T2000


Alfresco 1.4 (preview) is an open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management. Alfresco's architectures is based on a full service oriented architecture using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, MyFaces, JSR 168, JSR 170 and JSE5.


Recently we had tried it out on Sun Fire T2000. With out of box settings of Solaris and Alfresco we found some perofmance bottlenecks. After a series of tunings we overcame the bottlenecks. The deployment details through which we obtained optimum performance (atleast for this round of test) are as follows:


Solaris root drive was on one of the disk of Sun Fire T2000. Since the database was on a different server we just had to use this system for the repository primarily. The remaining three disks were stripped using the LSI RAID controller onboard the Sun Fire T2000. This three disk volume was then sliced into two 150GB, 50GB which were then mounted respectively as contentstore and the 50GB slice was used for lucene-index. This splitting of file systems seemed to help the index-creation threads of the lucene-index.
Since the product does lot of operations with files we also tuned UFS.
The /etc/system was modified to include the following additional tunables


* Tuning UFS
set segmap_percent=30
set ufs:ufs_WRITES=0
set ufs:freebehind=0


This increases about 30% of RAM available for file system buffer cache instead of the default of 12%.



(If you have the database on the same system (and on the internal drive if not external) then I would recommend three slices to use one slice for the database)


So with separating the filesystems for contentstore and lucene-index and setting the parameters for UFS in /etc/system, the alfresco application was ready to be used on Sun Fire T2000.


2 comments:

Dick Weisinger said...

Interesting.
But why try it using the 1.2 release?
Alfresco 1.3 has been available for a few months and now the 1.4 Community pre-release is available. Both are supposed to have performance improvements:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Roadmap#Performance_and_Scalability

Jignesh Shah said...

Thanks for catching that.. It is Alfresco 1.4 pre-release version.