For products:
Webtrends Enterprise 7.x
Webtrends Professional 7.x
Webtrends Small Business 7.x
Last modified: 10/1/2010
Introduction:
If the speed at which Webtrends' analysis completes takes precedence over the scope of its features, making the following modifications to the application and system settings can further improve performance.
Disable DNS resolution - Disable this globally under Web Analysis > Options > Analysis > Internet Resolution by unchecking the box for the "Domain Name/IP Resolution" option.
Disable GeoTrends resolution - This is disabled in the same location as the above-mentioned setting, but will still use significant memory, regardless of whether or not it is disabled in the user interface. To prevent GeoTrends from using resources, perform a modified installation and remove GeoTrends from the list of installed components.
HTML page title lookups - Webtrends retrieves the HTML page titles for each page it finds in the web logs, caching them for a limited time within the installation. While it is possible to increase the number of entries in the cache and the number of days cached, thereby reducing the frequency of retrieval, the greatest reduction of resources comes from disabling it entirely. This can be done by navigating to Web Analysis > Options > General and unchecking the box for "Retrieve HTML Page titles."
Analysis throttling - Analysis throttling determines the span of time which Webtrends analyzes in each pass before it goes back to retrieve more data from the log files. If the option to "Analyze all available log data" has been selected, the application will attempt to analyze all log files in the data source location (which have not yet been analyzed) in a single pass. On high-volume systems this can be resource-intensive and may slow down or even halt analysis altogether. This setting is only recommended for data sources with sparse content and/or on systems in which analysis occurs regularly as to guarantee manageable content.
The default value is one day and is sufficient for the majority of installations. Ensure the checkbox for "Rerun analysis immediately after maximum amount of data is analyzed" is checked to repeat the cycle until the current data is exhausted. Analysis may finish more quickly if the default value of one day is reduced to a span of hours, but this will be relative to the size and quantity of the log files. Very large log files will benefit from a shorter duration, and in conjunction with this setting, the option to "Update report data between each analysis period," which stops after each cycle and writes to the report database will, if disabled, forego updating report data, thereby saving time. The down-side to disabling this option is that if the analysis fails then no report data will be available. The analysis must complete in its entirety, after which it will display report data to the end of the data source. Analysis throttling can be disabled globally by navigating to Web Analysis > Options > Analysis > Analysis Throttling.
All-inclusive wildcards used for data sources - Defining data sources with *.* or * will result in Webtrends indexing all log files in the data source location. Even though all but the newest log files may have already been analyzed, Webtrends still has to parse through all of them to determine whether or not this is the case. To reduce the overall time taken for analysis, place only unanalyzed log files in that location. Also, if the data source is a local path on the Webtrends server, and the log files are not compressed, even more time can be saved because they will neither have to be moved over from another machine nor extracted from the compressed archive prior to analysis.
Other applications - Any applications other than the expected Windows services and processes can significantly contribute to the use of system resources. Installation of third-party applications is not supported.
Insufficient system requirements - If the server running Webtrends does not meet the hardware requirements then making many of the above changes may do little to improve performance. A detailed description of the system requirements is found in the releasenotes.htm file, located in the Webtrends installation directory. |
