System Performance landing page

Access the System Performance landing page by clicking Designer Studio >System > Performance. The following tabs are available:

• Performance Analyzer (PAL)
• Database Trace
• Performance Profiler
• Rules not using lightweight lists

PAL tab

Use this tab to understand the system resources consumed by processing a single requestor session, or the SQL statements sent to the PegaRULES database by the requestor session.

You can interact with the summary page to record statistics. See Performance tab — Using the Summary display. Click the INIT, FULL, or DELTA links to access the Full Details display for that row. This display provides additional statistics from the same snapshot. See Performance tab — Full Details Display.

Click:

• Add Reading — A new row of summary performance data appears. Statistics include input/output, elapsed time in seconds for certain processing, cache performance, locking, and server CPU demand, for the most recent interaction. Optionally, first click elsewhere in the portal window and perform one or several interactions that cause the performance you want to measure. The system retains extensive data for each interaction.
• Add Reading with Clipboard Size — A new row of summary performance data appears, including the size of the clipboard in bytes. Similar to Add Reading, but may add potentially costly processing.
• Reset Data — Initializes all counts and totals to zero.
• Save Data — Lets you save more than 100 statistics and values from each row into a Comma-Separated-Values file (CSV file type) for analysis with Microsoft Excel or other facilities. Column headings correspond to properties in the Code-Pega-PAL class, as presented on the Full Details display. (The value NaN indicates that a statistic was not available.)

Pega Platform always accumulates cumulative resource statistics for the Performance tool. Use the landing page to display these statistics, and to identify incremental resources (in the delta rows) consumed by your processing. Because this feature displays existing data, its use does not degrade processing.

Database Trace tab

You can monitor the interactions between the Pega Platform server engine and the PegaRULES database or external relational databases, and the operation of the rule cache. Familiarity with SQL is required to interpret the output.

Note: Operating this tool can adversely affect performance, and can produce a large volume of output. Use this tool only in appropriate non-production debugging environments, for short periods.

This tab is available only to users who hold the Code-Pega-.PerformanceTool privilege.

Before starting the Database Trace tool, click the Trace Options button and complete the options form. See Database Trace options. Select only the minimal set of options that are required to aid your debugging. Click OK, then click Close.

Click the Start icon to start the Database Trace tool. Perform the operations that you want to trace. Click the Stop icon to stop the tool. Trace details appear in the table, summarized by Thread.

System-wide database trace

An alternative approach that provides comprehensive tracing of SQL statements sent to the PegaRULES database is the dumpStats parameter in the prconfig.xml file.

To enable this feature:

1. Update the <database> node of the prconfig.xml file to add this element:
   <entry key="dumpStats" value="true" />
2. Stop and restart the application server.

Note: As an alternative to updating the prconfig.xml file, you can use Dynamic System Settings to configure your application. See Dynamic System Settings and the prconfix.xml file.

This setting generates a system-wide database trace file in the ServiceExport directory that can become very large quickly, and can affect system performance. Use this setting only for brief periods, and when a single-requestor DB trace is not suitable.

Performance Profiler tab

Use this tab to obtain a detailed trace of performance information about the execution of activities, when condition rules, and data transforms executed by your requestor session. The Profiler traces every execution (in all Threads) of rules of these three types in all rulesets. Trace records are saved as instances of the Log-Trace-Profiler class.

This tab provides more performance details than the Tracer tool. When enabled, the Profiler produces extensive output and requires substantial processing overhead. Disable this tool as soon as your data collection is complete.

For instructions, see About the Performance Profiler landing page tab.

Rules not using lightweight lists

This tab launches a utility that searches for rules in your application that are using page lists where they could instead use lightweight lists for better performance. See Rules not using lightweight lists utility.

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