By default: focus on resource utilization

By default, the Spotfire Server does not open the same analysis on a second Spotfire Web Player instance if the server determines that the first Spotfire Web Player instance is Available. This can result in requests cascading across all instances in a resource pool, so that the second instance is used only when the first instance is Strained, and the third instance is used only when the first and second instances are both Strained. You can change this behavior by changing the configuration.

For more information, see Understanding routing.

Strained status is not bad

If your Spotfire Web Player often end up in a Strained status, you can review the configuration of the service to determine how to better distribute resource pools and routing.

A status of Strained for a Spotfire Web Player is not necessarily a cause for concern; it just indicates that the Spotfire Web Player is busy and not overloaded. You can lower the thresholds for the Strained and Exhausted levels, so Spotfire will sooner open the analysis on other Web Players with a better health, as opposed to trying to route the analysis to a Web Player where the analysis is already loaded, depending on the specifics of your hardware. For example, a Spotfire Web Player with 512GB of RAM might always show Strained status, with the default threshold of 75% for RAM, even though that means that there is 128GB of RAM available. Changing the threshold can be more reasonable, in some cases.

Why change the Strained and Exhausted thresholds?

By modifying the Strained and Exhausted thresholds, you can change the balance between performance (response time) and efficiency (resource utilization):

• Lowering these thresholds might result in analyses being distributed across more instances, and provide faster response times. However, this might require more total resources (CPU/RAM/disk) as a given analysis might be loaded in different instances for different user sessions, instead of reusing resources in an instance where it was already loaded.
• Raising these thresholds means that each Spotfire Web Player instance will try to handle more user sessions and CPU/RAM/disk/load, and will provide better resource utilization. However, setting the thresholds too high can result in slower response times.

How to change the Strained and Exhausted thresholds

There are several Strained and Exhausted thresholds that you can configure: CPU, RAM, disk, and others.

• For Windows, see Spotfire.Dxp.Worker.Host.exe.config file.
• For Linux, see Spotfire.Dxp.Worker.Host.dll.config file.

Create custom routing rules

Another way that you can affect the routing is to create a routing rule to route requests to open a specific analysis, or requests from specific users or groups, to load on a predefined set of Spotfire Web Player instances.

See Routing rules for more information.