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Speeding up publishing

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jperreault

03 Feb, 2011 11:52 PM

Hi there,

We just ran our first test to publish the entire website. Unfortunately, it took over 20 hours to complete.

Publisher Concurrency was set to "medium". We're going to try again with "heavy"

Is there anything else that we can try to help speed up the process?

Thanks,

Jeff

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Tim on 04 Feb, 2011 03:15 PM

   

   Hi Jeff,

   • How many destinations are you publishing to? Many times, I see that clients have configured multiple destinations (for test, development, and production). Make sure that you are only publishing to production.

   • How much RAM is allocated to Cascade Server? Is Cascade installed on a dedicated machine with plenty of available resources?

   • Do you have Smart Publishing enabled in your Content Preferences?

   • Approximately how many assets are you publishing and are the majority of the assets Pages or Files (images, videos)?

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2. 2 Posted by jperreault on 07 Feb, 2011 07:20 PM

   

   Hi Tim,

   Thanks for your help, we are just setting up our production environment now.

   We have given Cascsade it's own dedicated server with 6Gig of ram. Here's the JAVA_OPTS:
   JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx4096m -Xms4096m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

   Yes, smart publishing is enabled ( I've attached a screenshot of the settings ).

   Our site has about 6,000 pages, the majority are just HTML, plus a few images, maybe a few PDFs.

   How does the publishing work? Does it have to render each page before uploading it? We have found that some of our pages take 40 seconds to render on the cascade server. Could that be our problem?

   • cascase-settings.jpg 116 KB
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3. 3 Posted by jperreault on 07 Feb, 2011 07:21 PM

   

   I forgot to add, the first time we tested publishing the whole site we did accidentally publish to dev, staging and production servers. I'm trying again now to see how that speeds it up.

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4. Support Staff 4 Posted by Tim on 07 Feb, 2011 07:27 PM

   

   Hi Jeff,

   Thanks for that information. Most of the specs look good. You will want to make a small change to your MaxPermSize setting. Go ahead and increase that value to 192M. So, your new JAVA_OPTS will be:
   

   JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx4096m -Xms4096m -XX:MaxPermSize=192m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"
   

   We have found that some of our pages take 40 seconds to render on the cascade server. Could that be our problem?

   Yes, this is more than likely the problem. During the publishing process, the system essentially renders the page in the background before pushing out to the physical server(s). This rendering process is equivalent to the amount of time it takes for the page to load when you click on the View tab in the system. A page that takes this long to load is usually indicative of some very large index blocks that probably need to be optimized. In some cases Formats can be culprits as well (usually dependent on XPath statements).

   Have you been able to narrow down which Blocks/Formats are taking the most time to render on your pages?

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5. 5 Posted by ddalquist on 07 Mar, 2011 09:36 PM

   

   Are there any logging configurations that can be added to help determine rendering/publishing roadblocks?

   We have five sites going, and the pages from the main site take 30-35 secs. to render (publishing takes half a day), while the 'intranet' site I'm building takes about 3 secs. for a page to render. I know there's a lot going on in the main site with feeds for some pages and lots of xslt behind most pages, but I wasn't involved in its development - any debugging ability would be greatly appreciated.

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6. Support Staff 6 Posted by Tim on 08 Mar, 2011 03:15 PM

   

   Sure. Try enabling DEBUG logging (System Menu -> Utilities -> Logging) for the following class name:
   

   com.hannonhill.cascade.model.task.TaskManager
   

   This will provide metrics in the log file for how long certain regions of pages take to render, etc. Since it tends to be verbose, be sure that you have plenty of HD space available on your application server if you plan to have this logging enabled over a long period of time.

   The good news is that this work will all be done for you in 6.8 with the introduction of Rendering Metrics.
   

   Let me know if you need anything else!

   Thanks

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7. Tim closed this discussion on 30 Nov, 2011 07:12 PM.