Performance Optimization

Iotellect is a complex system and its overall performance is affected by many factors. This article provides several performance optimization hints for different components of the system.

Iotellect is a very flexible low-code development platform. In most cases, a single application feature may be implemented in many varied ways using different Iotellect modules. Amount of configuration scenarios for those modules is countless.

All modules, methods and patterns used to construct an end-user business application or service constitute its architecture. If this architecture is not well designed, it will lead to inefficiency of the final application in terms of resources usage.

Thus, even if there are no obvious bugs in your app, its architecture should be carefully screened and revised if resources usage it too high. It's quite normal that finding and eliminating just a few bottlenecks may raise performance ten or even hundred times.

Iotellect Server is the central component of the system and if its performance is significantly degraded it will affect every other system component. Three key factors affecting the server performance are:

• Number of processors/cores and their frequency

• Amount of RAM installed

• Storage system I/O performance

The recommended hardware parameters can be found in System Requirements section. However, some device drivers require a lot of memory and/or processing power for device communications.

Generally, Iotellect Server should be moved to a higher performance server if the long-term average CPU load exceeds 50%. Such a high load rate may cause problems or even loss of device data during peak loads.

Memory concerns should be raised in the following cases:

• If extensive use of virtual memory (swapping) or page fault rate is detected

• If Iotellect Server response time and request processing speed decreases within a certain time after it was started

• If java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space messages appear in the server log file

The recommended sequence for troubleshooting memory issues:

• Increase the memory limit for Iotellect Server Java Virtual Machine

• Add physical RAM to the machine running Iotellect Server

• Switch to a dedicated database server

Memory concerns should be raised if Iotellect Server Memory Usage tracker reports values higher than 90%. It is important to know that Iotellect Server's Java Virtual Machine, just like any other JVM, will never use all RAM available on the machine it's running on. JVM memory use is controlled by two parameters:

• Initial amount of memory allocated by JVM

• Maximum amount of memory that can be used by a JVM

These parameters are described here.

If Memory Usage tracker reports a high memory usage percentage, it's necessary to increase a maximum amount of memory (-Xmx) parameter in the Iotellect Server Launcher Properties file. Values up to the half of available physical RAM are recommended.

Setting the maximum amount of memory too high may cause Iotellect Server startup problem, as JVM needs this memory to be available in a single contiguous block (see details here). If you experience such a problem, the installation of additional physical RAM is recommended.

In very large Iotellect installations with thousands of devices, Iotellect Server is usually working under a heavy load while receiving millions of events and performing hundreds of simultaneous synchronizations. All data is stored in the database. In some cases, even a multi-CPU system cores is not enough to perform all data processing.

For such large installations, having both Iotellect Server and database server running on the same machine may cause serious performance degradation. We recommend hosting your database server on a dedicated machine that is connected to the Iotellect Server's machine via a high-speed network interface.

Consider switching to a dedicated database server if:

• There are more than 10 000 devices managed by a single Iotellect Server installation

• Your database contains more than 100 million events

• There are devices those event history contains more than 1 million events (and, thus, there are database tables with more than 1 million records)

• Amount of RAM required for good performance of your database server is more than 50% of physical RAM installed in the machine running both Iotellect Server and database server

• The overall performance of your Iotellect installation is slow due to the high CPU load or disk paging

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