[progress Communities] [progress Openedge Abl] Forum Post: Re: Appserver Agents And Client...

[Mark Davies]

Hi Mark, A word of advice here... If this is a production server I would not set the logging level to verbose. If your client already has performance issues they will have it even worse - especially if the code has a huge amount of procedures calls and a big call stack. You didn't say which version of Progress they run on, but you can get the type of information you are looking for from running the progetstack script (while in a proenv environment). This will dump the stack trace (Windows and Linux/Unix). The stack trace has information about the program stack and all persistent running procedures. Also, if they are running an AppServer connecting to a database over the network I would strongly suggest that you look at changing it to use shared memory connection instead - we have seen an 80% performance increase by just doing that. Also look at lock scoping on your database - could be that records are being locked and is waiting for other agents to release it first. There is a utility called HCK that comes in quite handy to check for record locks. Check if agents are just taking to long to run something or if you have an influx of requests. If the latter, you probably need more appserver agents. In most cases we found that bad performing code, bad use of indexes on searches and just some really bad coding style is to blame for hanging agents. Use an XREF compile to check for WHOLE-INDEX scans on searches and resolve those first. HCK is also useful here - you can see how many record reads were done on a table - if this is high for something that should only return a few record then that could be the case. A bad query not using indexes could use major CPU resources and add to the slow response. If you have long-running reports being processed by the appserver then perhaps see if those can be moved to run on a scheduler later at night or when the application is in quiet time. Also check hardware - if the server is under speced for it use then it will not be able to handle the load.

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