Network
Providing sufficient network reliability and capacity are essential for the good performance and operation of any system.
The amount of data passed between ActiveMatrix BPM and the database, as well as that used for client interactions with ActiveMatrix BPM, is usually well below the bandwidth of most networks. However, the quality of the network and round-trip times merit close attention.
For all systems, and especially for larger systems with multiple BPM nodes (either across multiple machines or all on the same machine), monitor the network utilization.
A tool that presents live information is iftop (http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/), which gives a summary of interfaces and network traffic:
One aspect of networking that is harder to assess is the latency of the network between the ActiveMatrix BPM system and the database. Latency refers to a time delay; for example, the gap between when a device requests access to a network and when it receives permission to transmit. The network maybe very quick and have plenty of bandwidth, but if the latency is high, performance will be impacted.
Oracle have many documents on network performance, in particular, refer to section 7.3.8 of Oracle Configuration Best Practices (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/server.101/b10726/configbp.htm) says the following:
[the] infrastructure must have the following characteristics:
- Sufficient bandwidth to accommodate the maximum redo generation rate
- Minimal latency to reduce the performance impact on the production database
- Multiple network paths for network redundancy
The required bandwidth of a dedicated network connection is determined by the maximum redo rate of the production database.