Will adding more RAM help my performance issue?

[Mark Stancil]

Hi there,

I have an ADT interface thread that is lagging behind at 11AM every day due to a huge dump of ADT that is kicked off in the sending system.  The dump causes 30 – 45 minute delays for the downstream systems.  I’ll hav ethousands of message in a stste 7 in the recovery database waiting their turn to be processed.

Will adding more RAM improve my performance?

Thanks for the help.

Mark

Topic

[Robert Milfajt]

Not sure which version of Cloverleaf you are running, but you should take some system statistics during this time to see if memory is being totally consumed.  I would set up a monitor with vmstat and dump the output to a file and check that out.  You may find that you are CPU bound, memory bound or I/O bound.  Each will give you a different answer to fix.

You may find none of the above, in which case your ADT process is just handling too much data and you may need to split it out into multiple Cloverleaf processes.

Hope this helps,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike,

Do you know for sure you have memory saturation?

What platform are you on?

Have you looked at your I/O (Disk) subsystem to see if it is over committed during this time?

You can use Xlate throttling sometimes with success to pace the engine.

Do you have multiple CPUs and are there multiple processes involved? If multiple process is there cross-process communication going on?

Are any of the receiving systems notoriously slow in acknowledging (taking close to their timeout period to respond virtually all of the time – or even worse – causing resends)? Sometimes it only takes a couple of these ‘bad’ systems to muck things up during an excessive peak load.

Is it possible for the ADT system to pace the messages diuring this massive load (although 30 minutes plus is a long time)?

Could the sending system reschedule this ‘dump’ to a more benign time (like 1:00 AM) when the impact would not be felt so strongly (there would still be the delay but it is kind of like the tree falling with no one around)?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Ron Archambault]

Hey Mark,

Are you guys still running on a windows platform? Also, which version of Cloverleaf are you running and what type of processor ?

[John Mercogliano]

Mark,

  One thing you can try that helped us out in a similiar situation is to turn on translation throttling if you have not done so.  We have are settings at minimum of 10, max of 20 and 60%.  What could be happening is the translation thread is getting a large group of messages from the inbound queue but it won’t let go until it finishes processing all the messages it receives.  On a plus side for our high traffic sites it made the whole site more responsive when we have to bounce connections and such..

John Mercogliano
Sentara Healthcare
Hampton Roads, VA

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