Cognos Planning Contributor

Server Performance Tips and Advice

Overview

If you are looking for ways to improve the performance of your Cognos Planning Contributor Servers this article may offer you some tips and advice to help you tune your system for both speed and reliability.

Contributor Server Stability

To provide the best chance of getting a stable Contributor environment you need to be sure that your servers are configured correctly, both from a hardware and Operating System view. The following checklist will give you ideas on how to obtain a best-practice environment.

• Disable Hyper-Threading - Whilst this technology may be useful for "office applications" the Contributor Server components are already optimised to make the most of your server capacity, use of Hyper-Threading frequently degrades performance and proves unstable. This is disabled in the BIOS of your server and is a technology of Intel based processors.
• Size your server based on RAM per physical CPU core. As a guide a minimum of 1GB of RAM per CPU core should be used.
• Whilst Cognos Contributor Job Servers will utilise as many CPU's as you can throw at it, consider using multiple servers with fewer processors for improved performance as multiple servers are often cheaper than bigger servers, but also offer you greated redundancy and flexibility.
• Use fast CPU's with large CPU cache, this is particularly useful for Contributor Job Processing as the job tasks are very CPU intensive.
• Always use the latest Operating System service pack level supported by Cognos, frequently instability of the software or poor performance can be directly linked to OS bugs and MDAC problems rather than problems of the software its self.
• Turn on Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for essential Windows Programs and services only.

Get the latest RDBMS Client

The reliance on the Database Client components is heavy. Data import is completed using tools such as SQLLoader (Oracle) and BCP (SQL Server) so ensuring you have the latest and best versions of the client components can make a huge difference to server performance.

It is important however, to get advice from Cognos Support prior to planning any upgrades of this nature to be confident that your planned software environment has no known issues or is not going to invalidate your Cognos Support agreement.