Prizm Content Connect
Sizing Servers
| Getting Started with PCC > Sizing Servers |
This topic is intended to give you general guidance on the factors that will impact performance of Prizm Content Connect so that you can adequately plan your deployment and ensure that you have sufficient hardware to handle your needs. You should consider the type of documents that you will be processing and, based on the information provided below, adjust our recommendations accordingly to fit your use case. If you have more specific questions regarding your unique usage of Prizm Content Connect, contact your Support team at support@accusoft.com.
Prizm Content Connect can process many different types of files. The majority of files processed by Prizm Content Connect displayed in the HTML5 Viewer are PDF, Microsoft Office formats (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel), and scanned images. The system is capable of processing many files types outside of this basic set. For benchmarking purposes, we focus on processing the more commonly used formats.
The content of files can vary greatly, and their construction can affect Prizm Content Connect’s ability to process them. Any of the factors mentioned below could cause file processing and rendering time to deviate from the performance expected from a basic document set.
The number of elements that exist within a file will affect how quickly the Prizm Content Connect services can convert the content in the necessary viewing format. CAD Drawings and PDF Documents using path elements to represent CAD data will contain many elements and require more time to convert. Elements within a file are not limited to the path elements, but text content can also be a factor.
Images can be content on their own, but images are also embedded into PDF and Office files. The size of the images that the system needs to process can affect the system’s ability to load the content being supplied. As the size of the image(s) increases, the amount of time needed to process the content increases. For example, the PDF standard allows for images to be stored within the file, while only displaying a small portion of the image. While the image may appear to be small in size, the information stored in the file can be larger than expected.
Uploading a file to the server before it can be processed will take some time. The size of a file can also be representative of the complexity of the file. As the file size increases, the amount of time to transfer and load the data will increase.
Certain file types, by their nature, may contain more of the above defined factors. CAD drawings will contain many line and path elements to represent the information that is needed. As these files grow in size, they will contain more data and require more processing for the system to generate content for display.
There is not one single piece of hardware that will address the performance concerns that you might have. In order to avoid under-utilizing your hardware, Accusoft recommends keeping these different characteristics in balance within your environment.
In its default configuration on common hardware of the day, the biggest limiting resource for PCCIS is most likely to be disk IO. PCCIS caches a considerable amount of data on a local drive consisting of document data, both original and converted, as well as state and other information.
As the load increases on a server, the data being written and read from disk will continue to grow with each new request. We often see customers proposing hardware configurations that possess multiple core and thread CPUs, but only a single, ~7200 RPM Hard Disk Drive. A single IO device in this situation can quickly become overburdened, causing the queue length for the IO device to grow to the point where much of the actual time used for document conversions is spent waiting for IO requests. There are options today that can greatly improve IO transfer rates:
Maximizing the number of Disk I/O operations your system can perform will be the most beneficial investment you can make in order to allow the system hosting Prizm Content Connect to perform at its peak.
The CPU is another resource that should be considered when determining hardware requirements for PCC. Assuming PCC performance is not bottlenecked by Disk IO (either SSD, Shared Memory, or other Disk IO optimization is in use), the ideal range for CPU usage is about 60% total, across all available logical cores. The 60% target is a guideline to where system activity should be for the system to be at peak productivity.
Through our experimentation and testing, we recommend that a server contain 2GB of Memory per Physical CPU core for use by Prizm Content Connect for processing. Any Memory considerations for a RAM Disk or Shared Memory Volume should be made in addition to this recommendation.
The throughput expressed in this document is defining the number of unique documents the system can convert for viewing per minute. If a document has already been converted for display and is cached, the system resources needed to transfer that data are minimal and are not considered in these estimates. The documents included in the recommendation represent a standard mix of Office and PDF files ranging in size from a few pages to few hundred pages.