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Improving the Speed of Local Solutions
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The OpenEngagement DMS can be made to be very fast. Some sites, for example, can handle up to 2,000 page requests/second, and a local copy of OpenEngagement DMS may also operate at this or greater speeds. However, this requires a great deal of work if the site has large volumes of data or heavy traffic.
The main strategies to improve the performance of OpenEngagement DMS instances are: caching, improving the hardware and/or operating system used, packing the database, using ZEO, reducing data volume, reducing site traffic, de-fragmenting the database files, and clearing the browser cache.
Caching is done generally by fronting the DMS with either Apache or Squid.
The DMS benefits greatly from improving the hardware on which it runs, particularly by giving it more RAM. Users should also adjust the database cache size to take full advantage of the RAM that is available on the computer.
The DMS must run on Windows to operate properly. It is possible to run the DMS on Linux, or high performance operating systems such as NetBSD or FreeBSD, but this is not supported by OpenEngagement out of the box. It is possible, though, and is done on the OpenEngagement Hosted Solutions by splitting the server over multiple boxes, one of which runs Windows. Windows is necessary to parse the CaseWare client files as they are uploaded, to extract the period ends and other such information.
The database will be packed automatically on a nightly basis. However, after uploading many files to the DMS, the site may slow down, and may benefit from being packed. Only Administrators have permission to pack the database.
ZEO is easy to install on Linux/UNIX computers, but is not as easy to install on Windows, though it is documented and is certainly possible. ZEO is useful for improving the speed of DMS instances where performance is suffering due to high web traffic. ZEO will not improve the performance of the OpenEngagement DMS otherwise. ZEO allows firms to use several computers for their OpenEngagement DMS. ZEO must be combined with a load balancing application, such as Pound.
Firefox has a highly effective system for maintaining its browser cache so as to prevent the browser from becoming slow, but IE does not. For this reason users may benefit from clearing their browser caches manually from time to time when using IE, or from using Firefox. As well, users may download or purchase browser cache management applications for managing their IE caches. Some of these application actually manage the browser cache and others simply notify the user when the cache should be manually cleared. Many are quite inexpensive.