Remedy ITSM v9 Performance revisited
In a previous blog post we reported on some initial findings on the relative end user performance of ITSM v9.0 compared to ITSM v7.6.04 and ITSM v8.1 while under load.
Since that report we have been working with our partners Alderstone and the BMC performance testing team to further explore the performance characteristics of ITSM v9.0.
We are very pleased to report that BMC were very cooperative in this and we were able to work with them to provide some valuable insights which we hope will be of use to the wider community.
Methodology
For this test BMC and Scapa Technologies agreed to concentrate on ITSM v9.0 in its default configuration and to tune some system settings to better improve the performance. Using Scapa TPP, BMC performed the following test cases – these duplicated the tests in our initial report. These tasks were captured in a browser session and parameterised for uniqueness with Scapa’s automatic processing – no scripting or programming was needed.
| Console task |
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| Create Task |
| Login |
| Open Create Incident form |
| Populate the form, using lookups for Customer Name, Company name, etc. |
| Add a unique text summary such as the incident ID |
| Assign the incident to self |
| Change Status to “In Progress” and Save |
| Using the Search form, search on the unique text set (summary string) in Step 4 |
| Open the searched for incident |
| Update and close the incident |
| Logout |
The number of active users was progressively ramped up to increase the load on the system. As in the earlier tests, a Scapa Control Sequence was used to ramp up the load automatically to ensure that the same load was applied to each iteration of testing.
| Step | Duration | Console users | Create users | Total users |
| 1 | 5 minutes | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| 2 | 5 minutes | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| 3 | 10 minutes | 30 | 10 | 40 |
| 4 | 10 minutes | 60 | 20 | 80 |
| 5 | 10 minutes | 120 | 40 | 160 |
| 6 | 20 minutes | 180 | 80 | 260 |
Results
The output from BMC’s initial test run was very similar to those recorded in the initial report produced by Alderstone and Scapa Technologies in May.
Using Scapa TPP to repeat the test runs and through the use of system monitoring tools BMC were able to identify some areas of the configuration that could be improved from the out of the box settings.
These configuration changes were:
Database
- The Database (MSSQL) was configured to have a Maximum Degree of Parallelism to 1, rather than no limit.
Mid Tier
- The JVM hosting the mid tier had its JVM minimum heap size increased from 1GB to 2GB.
- Mid Tier logging was reconfigured to Interval only.
- Preload on the Mid Tier was disabled after an initial preload.
- The maxThreads parameter on Tomcat was increased from 300 to 600.
AR Server
- Java Min heap size changed from 512MB to 4GB.
- Java Max heap was changed from 6GB to 4GB.
Java Garbage Collection was tweaked using the following Options:
- option.14=-XX:+UseCompressedOops
- option.15=-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
- option.16=-XX:+UseParNewGC
Once these changes had been applied, the tests were executed again and response times markedly improved at the peak load point, and compared favourably with ITSM 8.1 SP2.
Conclusions
This exercise has demonstrated that with some small configuration changes to your ITSM implementation you can make quite a difference to the user experience of ITSM 9.0 and get the best out of your current hardware setup. Repeated testing of the changes drives out real end user performance improvements.
We hope that this set of tests, combined with BMC’s report on some of the heavier server side use cases provided by BMC in their July report, will put to rest any fears about making the leap to ITSM v9.0.
We also believe that this exercise proves the value of performance testing and tuning in any environment.
Scapa Technologies would like to thank BMC for their co-operation during this exercise, and to Alderstone for facilitating the tests as well as their extensive Remedy expertise.
Please contact us or Alderstone for more information about how we can help you ensure that your ITSM 9.0 upgrade meets your performance needs.