Attached is my WC_Default server config settings. I was asked to find the optimal number of agents for our hardware (Windows Server 2003, Quad Core Xeon @ 3 GHz, 3.75 GB RAM). This is a dedicated production machine.

We want the optimum amount of agents available, but not too many.

Any rule of thumb? I'm interested as to the theory behind this as well.

- ABT

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

From what I was told is 20 – 40 agents per CPU for concurrency. I think it’s closer to 20. Now with that being said do not go out and change up your settings to have all these agents running and available. You will only consume CPU and memory that could take away when you need it the most.

Depending on what you want, there are some options that you can set to help drive performance. For us, we have several real time dashboards and on each dashboard runs about 6 agents when a user logs in initially, so that’s 1 user to 6 agents. I was concerned from a user concurrancy standpoint and having 150 users all on at the same time using countless agents as they move from report to report and so forth and keeping our response times under 15 seconds.

With the help of IBI, we were able to tune our Reporting Server to our needs with Queuing turned on, only having 15 agents running with a max of 25 agents in total. We have a 4 core Windows box. We found that Queuing made a huge difference in our case as it throttles the agents to not spike the CPU and allowed faster throughput. In our case memory was a non-factor during our load testing, memory never moved.

They showed me some pretty cool scaling tools available on the server that you can record and playback scripts and gauge your performance. I would also consider using a 3rd party tool to perform load testing if you have one.

Hope this provides some insight.

Matt,
That's great, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. So increasing agents = working harder whereas turning on queuing = working smarter? I know that's a little generalized, but it's a second option I wasn't aware of.

Any other opinions/experiences from others?

- ABT