Performance considerations
This page is a guide to getting the most performance out of OL Connect as well as a rough guideline to indicate when it's best to upgrade.
Performance analysis details
In OL Connect, after each print job, a message dialog displays a print job summary (see Print Job Summary dialog). This summary may help you determine how best to maximize the performance of OL Connect.
OL Connect's Weaver engine can generate output at 8000 PPM (pages per minute).
If your print jobs are not running at the licensed speed, there may be several ways to improve the performance, as described below. Note however that it is not guaranteed that the licensed speed can be achieved with any job. Creating output for templates with very complex scripts or complex graphics resources will take a certain amount of time, even on high-end hardware.
If your print jobs are running at the licensed speed, then improving performance will require upgrading to the Professional or Enterprise edition. For advice please contact your local sales office.
Engine configuration
A DataMapper engine extracts data from a data file. A Merge engine merges the template and the data to create Email and Web output, or to create an intermediary file for Printed output. The intermediary file is in turn used by a Weaver engine to prepare the Print output. A Merge engine merges the template and the data to create an intermediary file for Printed output. The intermediary file is in turn used by a Weaver engine to prepare the Print output.
Configuring these engines to match the hardware configuration is probably the fastest and most effective way to improve OL Connect's performance. See Engines preferences for how to do this.
Template optimization
When you find that the speed per Merge engine - the Content Creation speed - is low, optimizing a template can make a huge difference. For advice on how to optimize a template see: Optimizing a template.
Network and internet connections
Use a fast network and internet connection or avoid loading external or internet resources. Using images, JavaScript or CSS resources located on a slow network or on a slow internet connection will obviously lead to a loss of speed. While we do our best for caching, a document with 5,000 records which queries a page that takes 1 second to return a different image each time will, naturally, slow output generation down by up to 83 minutes.
Hardware configuration
When processing speed is important, the following is suggested after addressing the other issues mentioned in this topic.
- Antivirus exclusions. Sometimes, virus scanners, other security software or indexing services can interfere. It can help to disable those kinds of tools for the areas where Connect stores intermediate files. You could exclude the entire
C:\Users\<connectuser>\Connectfolder. See also: Antivirus Exclusions. - Use a high-performance, low-latency hard drive. Connect benefits from fast I/O. Preferably use a Solid State Drive (SSD) or similar for storage.
- Use at least 8+ GB High-Quality RAM. Check memory usage while the Print command is being executed to see if you need more than the minimum of 8GB. Assuming that the
- Consider using a physical machine instead of a virtual machine. When running on a Virtual Machine, the machine may report that it has sufficient hardware (cores) available, but in a virtual environment you need to make sure that this hardware is not being shared with lots of other virtual machines.
- Consider using hardware with more physical cores. OL Connect doesn't limit the number of Merge engines that is used for a Print job, so if the number of physical cores is low, it makes sense to see if that can be increased. When running on a virtual machine, this is usually easy. When running on a physical machine, it means that you may have to switch hardware.
- For both virtual and non-virtual environments, make sure the machine is not busy with all kinds of other processes.