Multiple Web Player instances on one node

Adding more than one Spotfire Web Player instance could be beneficial, particularly on large computers with NUMA architecture.

For failover reasons, it is recommended to have more than one instance in your environment. It is possible to have several instances in the same node, but it is recommended to distribute the instances along different nodes for high availability.

There are two main reasons for adding more service instances on the same node:

If there are unstable analyses that are suspected to result in issues for the process, these analyses can be routed to one dedicated service instance using file routing rules. This isolates the analyses from other instances.
A very large .NET heap may lead to long running garbage collections, blocking normal execution. By distributing analyses that lead to a large .NET memory footprint over more than one service instance, the .NET heap becomes smaller, which leads to quicker garbage collections.

There are some reasons to avoid using too many service instances:

Each service instance requires some overhead, mostly in terms of memory usage but also some CPU usage.
There is no data or document sharing between service instances.
When using containerized Web Player services, you want to limit the number of processes within each container. In this case, you would use one Web Player instance per container image. This way, it is faster and easier to spin up/down containers for auto scaling or balancing within the K8s cluster.

You may want to experiment with fewer or more service instances, especially on large computers.