Maintenance Manual

74 Enterprise Chat and Email Deployment and Maintenance Guide
Performance Tuning Considerations
One of the first steps towards tuning an application is to determine evolving requirements, which is not easy as
requirements are likely to vary across different types of users. Administrators, typically, want the system to be
easily configurable for various user loads, security needs, and application uptime. Business managers tend to
care about issues such as security considerations for critical data that is passed between various components
within the application, response times, reliability, availability, and scalability. For agents, response time is the
most important factor that defines a finely tuned system.
Enterprise Chat and Email Design Guide helps to plan the configuration when you first set it up. In this section,
we provide a quick overview of some of the factors that should be considered as the system grows.
Peak Concurrent Usage
The application will need to be tuned if there is a need to meet specific concurrent usage requirements.
Concurrent usage includes usage by email and chat agents as well as chat sessions. The general guideline is that
the greater the number of concurrent users, the likelier it is for the system to be stressed resulting in longer
response times.
Email Volume
The email volume that the application handles determines the amount of disk space used by the database, size of
active and master databases, and the capacity of the database engine to provide optimal response times to data
requests. Active usage of email attachments and Knowledge Base (KB) articles also affect disk space
requirements.
Security Requirements
Often security requirements dictate that the application data should be accessed in a secure way. For this reason
secure sockets layer (SSL) mode of access to information is set up. Likewise, sharing and access to critical
information such as customer data require that data is stored and retrieved in a secure way by extra access
control and beyond.
Additional security requirements do lead to some delay in response times for users accessing the application.
This should be clearly understood by administrators setting up SSL mode of access on web servers or trying to
access information stored on remote and highly secure resources like remotely mounted file systems or disks.
 See Enterprise Chat and Email Installation Guide for information about how to set up the SSL mode of
communication on the web server.