Improving Performance

This chapter describes some techniques that you can use to improve the performance of the Maps applications.

If you notice especially long delays when updating your Maps views, try stopping the monitor daemon so that it will not continually try to update the maps. To stop the monitor daemon, use the following procedure:

Step 1 Select Admin>Process Control from the menu bar.

Step 2 Select the check box next to the monitor daemon.

Step 3 Click Stop.

Stop the Poller Daemon While Doing Discovery

Before you select Admin>Discover to discover your DLSw or RSRB network, select Admin>Process Control and stop the poller daemon. When discovery is done, you can again select Admin>Process Control and restart the poller daemon.

Limit Remote Users

If you are running short of memory at the Maps workstation, you should limit the number of remote Maps users. Each Maps session requires about 20MB of system memory in addition to the memory needed to display each graphical map.

Close Unused Maps Windows

You should close Maps windows when you no longer need them open. When several Maps windows are open, any change in a view to any one of the open windows causes all Maps windows to hang until the changing view has been completely refreshed. The delay is especially noticeable when a change occurs in a global view, in which any network change can result in a lengthy update cycle.

Close the Process Control Window

When you select Admin>Process Control from the Maps menu bar, and then leave the Process Control window open or leave it as an icon on your desktop, Maps uses system resources to keep the information in the window current. To save system resources, close the Process Control window when you are not using it.

Use Sybase Raw Partitions for DLSw

The performance of the Maps DLSw application is enhanced when you configure Maps to use raw partitions instead of UNIX file-system files for the SNA data and log Sybase databases. Performance gains are more significant on networks with 500 or more routers. To have Maps use raw partitions, two raw partitions must be available at the time of installation. For more information, see the section "Configuring CiscoWorks Blue Maps on HP-UX or Solaris" in the "Installing and Configuring CiscoWorks Blue Maps" chapter.

Improve DLSw Poller Performance

There are several changes you can make to improve the performance of the DLSw poller. You can customize the number of active threads to improve the bandwidth or the response time, and you can limit the amount of polling in the network.

Improving Bandwidth or Response time

You can make changes to the DLSw poller's threads and sleep times (described in the section "Using cwbinit to Configure Polling Intervals" in the "Using the DLSw Application" chapter ) that will improve either bandwidth (the amount of network resources consumed by DLSw) or response time (the time it takes the DLSw application to detect a change in the network).

To decrease the bandwidth, decrease the number of threads and increase the sleep times.
To improve response time, increase the number of threads and decrease the sleep time.

You can change the number of threads by changing the values of the numKeyPeerPollThreads, numNonKeyPeerPollThreads, and numKeyCircuitPollThreads variables in the cwbinit file.

You can change the sleep times by changing the values of the keyCircuitPollSleepTime, nonKeyPeerPollSleepTime, and directedPollSleepTime variables in the cwbinit file.

Limiting Polling

You can make changes that will limit the amount of polling done by the DLSw application.

If you do not need SNA-correlation with DLSw circuits, you can stop DLSw circuit polling. To stop DLSw circuit polling, set pollKeyCircuit = off in the cwbinit file.
If you do not want to poll the remote routers, set pollNonKeyPeer = off in the cwbinit file, and ensure that the actively managed routers are on the list of key devices.

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Improving Performance