Ask the Expert - Captiva: Is your system healthy? What to look for to make sure your system is performing optimally

This Ask the Expert discussion is now open for questions and comments. we look forward to a lively and interactive discussion on Captiva Health.

Please use this presentation to frame your questions.  Anything off topic may require you to open a service request with Support.

Captiva Is Your System Healthy.pdf

To keep your system healthy run a row count on all tables in your database and identify the large tables.  Large is anything over a million rows.  If you find some make sure they are only reporting tables and that the tables are being purged through Captiva Administrator.

Yes. Also, if you have Audits enabled, expect the database to grow very quickly and overall InputAccel Server performance to degrade. Hence, it is very critical to schedule a periodic purge of the Audit Logs to avoid the InputAccel Database from growing too large too quickly.

One key cause of performance issues is a slow disk system.  If it seems like a possible cause in your case, it's worth running the PixSafeTestApp utility, which you can obtain from Support, to check the speed of the disk - any returned value above 100 is slow, although a good disk generally returns less than 60.

When using Dispatcher, don’t forget to send your Dispatcher project to production using the “send to production” button (ctrl+P) in Dispatcher Manager. This streamlines the project by removing unnecessary files (such as the template image base), thus reducing the project size and the time for it to be loaded into memory when starting a task.

Did you know that idle batches could cause performance degradation as well?

Make sure that you have rule setup to delete the batches from the server once they are done.

To understand the impact of idle batches on the server, it is important to learn about how the InputAccel Server loads batches in memory:

1. After a restart, the InputAccel Server loads all batches, checks batch integrity, and adds them back to the database. When there is heavy client processing at the same time, overall server throughput for processing tasks is degraded.

  2. Some client module operations require InputAccel Server to load every batch. Loading every batch means the InputAccel Server must first unload some other batch to make room for the batch being loaded, then load the batch. When this occurs, InputAccel Server throughput is significantly degraded.

The more idle batches that you have, the more the throughput degradation.

A convenient way to monitor the performance of the IA Server is to use the performance counters that are bundled with IA. These can be used with Microsoft's Performance Monitor. Select from the following objects to monitor:

• IA:DAL
• IA:Logging
• IA:Security
• IA:Server_InputAccel
• IA:Server_Inputaccel_Modules

This is documented in the Help Guide but some of the items that can be logged are:

• % Load Factor
• Avg. Execution Time Millisec
• Data Requests/sec
• Batch Loads/sec
• Disk Bytes Read/sec
• etc.

If your disk is found to be slow, bear in mind that RAID 5 is not recommended because of its slow performance, but RAID 10 is faster and equally fault tolerant. Also, bear in mind that using a NAS or any form of shared folder (UNC path) for the IAS root is not recommended for several reasons, one of which is poor performance, because the IA server makes heavy use of this folder and the throughput of an Ethernet connection is much less than that of a native disk controller.

Send to production can also be used when using Captiva Advanced Recognition: Set the send to production folder of your recognition project to the same path as the RecognitionProjectSharedDirectory value in the File management section of GlobalOptions in the System Configuration tab (Captiva Designer) to ensure your project doesn't become too cumbersome.

To add additional comment to David's post is that when you use the Send to Production copy of Dispatcher Project it is a subset of the full Project. This only has the parts of the project that is needed. So, by using this copy the Dispatcher modules have less to load and manage in memory.

Taking this a step further, if you want a very fast server give it access to a very fast IAS folder.  The faster disk access to the IAS folder the faster the IA Server.  It has been shown in some implementations where a SSD (Solid State Drive) for the IAS folder can increase performance of the IA Server by 100%.

Have you considered running IAS on Physical machine?

It has been observed that if you are running IAS service on a Virtul machine then there is a performance degradation.

The benchmark test when using same hardware while running on Physical vs VM has showed a 27% reduction in InputAccel Server throughput when using the virtual machine. It's a best practice to run your IAS on a physical machine.

You may ask yourself "how do I know if I have my IA Server is sized correctly". A great tool is the "Captiva Capture Batch and Process Modeler.xlsm" spreadsheet that can determine the number of tasks/hour the IA Server has to process. Once this is known then you can use the recommendations in the Performance Tuning Guide to determine the number of CPU cores.