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Adobe Social Collaboration:

A Deep Dive Into Performance and Scalability
Sruthisagar Kasturirangan, Infrastructure Architect, Infrastructure Practice, SapientNitro, Bangalore

INTRODUCTION
Adobes Social Collaboration unifies all social networking and collaboration applications within AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and has gained a lot of attentionin part because todays consumers are increasingly active on various mobile devices and placing a lot of value on feedback from fellow buyers. And smart content and commerce platforms are capitalizing on Social Collaboration to boost sales and give the end user the best experience possible. In order to understand Adobes Social Collaboration better, we dove into a complete analysis of its performance and scalability aspects. We accomplished this by performing tests with Adobes provided JMeter scripting framework for running the benchmark tests youll see below. The tests include scripts that perform pure write operations so that its possible to measure the overall throughput that can be supported in order to eventually arrive at a physical architecture sizing and capacity plan. Through these tests, we are now able to provide a general guidance on the methodology needed in order to size the infrastructure and identify key bottlenecks when integrating Social Collaboration as part of the overall design of a content and collaboration platform. This paper has been written not to contend the results provided by Adobe Systems Incorporated in their documentation but to extend the results for virtualized environments due to the influx in development in the arena of cloud hosting. The following results have been elaborately analyzed and discussed before arriving at the conclusions youre about to read.

Experimental Setup
First, lets briefly go through the experimental setup we used to conduct those benchmark tests, including the AEM version used, the system configuration, the benchmark architecture, and the test scenario.

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AEM Version
AEM 5.6.0

System Configuration

Author & Publish Environments: 8 CPUs Currently (Logical CPUs) 8 CPUs Configured Number of Processors: 2 (Allocated) PowerPC_POWER7 Processor 64 bit Hardware 7.1.2.1 TL02 AIX Kernel Version Memory Size: 8192MB Total Paging Space: 2048MB JVM Settings: Maximum Heap Size: 4GB; PermGen: 512MB; IBM J9VM 1.6, GENCON Algorithm

Benchmark Architecture

SINGLE PUBLISH CONFIGURATION REVERSE REPLICATION

USER REQUESTS

AUTHOR NODE

PUBLISH NODE

Test Scenario

The tests below were all performed using Adobes out-of-the-box application Geometrixx. Adobes benchmark scripts have procedures to create multiple users in the author and publish environments so that a realistic test scenario can be created. In this case, a test forum topic was created with a small description. The user was then pre-authenticated during the warm up and, once authenticated, held the session and performed continuous write operations.

Iterations
The various iterations of testing are tabulated and the details of the load model and results are described in the following sections. In particular, the result sections are focused on analyzing the transactions per second as a function of the total number of transactions and average response times (i.e., time taken for last byte).

Load Model

#Generic properties: threads/users. #All timings are in seconds. #startThreadCount is the total number of concurrent threads/users. (For 5 requests per second, set it to 150.) #startupDelay is the ramp-up time for starting threads. (For 150 threads, set it to 60 seconds.) #holdLoadFor is the time the test is run. (For 10 minutes, set it to 600.) #shutdownTime is the time it takes the threads to shut down. (Set it to the same value as startupDelay.) #requestsPerSec is the number of requests per number of seconds.

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Iteration 1

startThreadCount (the total number of concurrent users/threads)=150 startupDelay=60 holdLoadFor=1200 shutdownTime=0 requestsPerSec=2 RPSduration=30 Load Ramp Up Model
Expected parallel users count 200 180 http://apc.kg/plugins

Number of active threads

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 00:00:00 00:02:06 00:04:12 00:06:18 00:08:24 00:10:30 Elapsed Time 00:12:36 00:14:42 00:16:48 00:18:54 00:21:00

Throughput Throttling
Expected RPS 10 9 http://apc.kg/plugins

Number of requests/sec

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 00:00:00 00:00:03 00:00:06 00:00:09 00:00:12 00:00:15 Elapsed Time 00:00:18 00:00:21 00:00:24 00:00:27 00:00:30

Note: This test was run with Ultimate Thread Group by throttling requests per second to 2.

Results
TPS
1.72 1.7 1.68 1.66 1.64 1.62 1.6 1.58 1.56 1.54 470 755 1044 1341 1644 1940 2234

TPS

Transactions

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AVG_RESPONSE_TIME
3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 470 755 1044 1341 1644 1940 2234 AVG_RESPONSE_TIME

Transactions

Response Times vs. Elapsed Time

30 000 27 000 24 000

Response times in ms

21 000 18 000 15 000 12 000 9 000 6 000 3 000 0 00:00:00 00:04:05 00:08:11 00:12:17 00:16:23 00:20:28 00:24:34 00:28:40 00:32:46 00:36:51 00:40:57

add Topic to Publish Node get Topic Page setTotalTime

http://apc.kg/plugins

Elapsed Time (granularity: 100 ms)

From the graphs above, it is clear that only when the load is throttled in such a way as to limit the TPS (transactions per second) to be around 2 are we able to achieve response times within an acceptable range. Throttling is performed using a JMeter Plugin (Ultimate Thread Group) but this does not indicate the concurrent user sessions. Therefore, additional testing is required to understand the behaviors associated with these changing user patterns.

Iteration 2

startThreadCount (the total number of concurrent users/threads)=150 startupDelay=1200 holdLoadFor=1200 shutdownTime=0 Load Ramp Up Model
Expected parallel users count 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 00:00:00 00:04:00 00:08:00 00:12:00 00:16:00 00:20:00 Elapsed Time 00:24:00 00:28:00 00:32:00 00:36:00 00:40:00
http://apc.kg/plugins

Note: This test was run without Ultimate Thread Group and no throttling was applied

Number of active threads

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Results
TPS
4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 482 1223 1971 2748 3454 4192 4953 5736 6432 7166 7935 8734 9500 9882

TPS

Transactions

AVG_RESPONSE_TIME
30000 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 482 1223 1971 2748 3454 4192 4953 5736 6432 7166 7935 8734 9500 9882 AVG_RESPONSE_TIME

Transactions

Response Times vs. Elapsed Time

200 000 180 000 160 000 140 000

Response times in ms

120 000 100 000 80 000 60 000 40 000 20 000 0 00:00:00

add Topic to Publish Node get Topic Page setTotalTime

00:04:03

00:08:06

00:12:09

00:16:12

00:20:15

00:24:18

00:28:21

00:32:24

00:36:27

00:40:30

http://apc.kg/plugins

Elapsed Time (granularity: 500 ms)

From the graphs above, we can see that the load was not throttled and users were ramped up at the rate of 1 user every 8 seconds. The moment all 150 users were ramped up, the response times grew to a level that were not within acceptable limits for the page performance.

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Iteration 3

startThreadCount (the total number of concurrent users/threads)=10 startupDelay=100 holdLoadFor=600 shutdownTime=0

Load Ramp Up Model

Expected parallel users count 10 9 http://apc.kg/plugins

Number of active threads

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 00:00:00 00:01:10 00:02:20 00:03:30 00:04:40 00:05:50 Elapsed Time 00:07:00 00:08:10 00:09:20 00:10:30 00:11:40

Note: This test was run without Ultimate Thread Group and no throttling was applied.

Results
TPS
2.55 2.5 2.45 2.4 2.35 2.3 2.25 2.2 2.15 2.1 2.05 459 946 1429 1774

TPS

Transactions

AVG_RESPONSE_TIME
3700 3600 3500 3400 AVG_RESPONSE_TIME 3300 3200 3100 3000 459 946 1429 1774

Transactions

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Response Times vs. Elapsed Time

10 000 9 000 8 000 7 000

Response times in ms

6 000 5 000 4 000 3 000 2 000 1000 0 00:00:00

add Topic to Publish Node get Topic Page setTotalTime

00:01:10

00:02:21

00:03:31

00:04:42

00:05:53

00:07:03

00:08:14

00:09:25

00:10:35

00:11:46

http://apc.kg/plugins

Elapsed Time (granularity: 500 ms)

From the graphs above, we can see that, since the load was not throttled and users were ramped up at the rate of 1 user every 10 seconds, the moment all 10 users were ramped up, the response times grew to a level that were not within acceptable limits for the page performance. In this scenario, it did not make any sense to go below 10 concurrent users. And since the average response times were in the order of 3.5 seconds, it was concluded that a single publish server would be able to support less than 10 concurrent users.

Overall System Utilization

Publish
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 03:50 02:10 02:20 02:30 02:40 02:50 03:10 03:20 03:30 03:40 04:00 04:10 04:20 04:30 04:40 04:50 05:00 05:10 05:20 00:50 00:00 00:30 05:30 01:20 01:30 01:50 02:00 03:00 01:00 00:10 00:20 00:40 01:40 01:10

CPU Total hdadhdcom03 19-7-2013

User% Sys% Wait%

Author
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 01:50 02:00 02:10 05:10 05:20 05:30 00:00 00:20 00:30 00:50 02:50 03:00 03:30 03:50 04:50 05:00 05:40 00:10 00:40 01:00 01:10 01:20 01:30 01:40 02:20 02:30 02:40 03:10 03:20 03:40 04:00 04:10 04:20 04:30 04:40

CPU Total hdadhdcom01 19-7-2013

User% Sys% Wait%

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CONCLUSION
After conducting this series of tests, and then discussing and analyzing them, weve arrived at a few key takeaways that we think are worthwhile to consider: 1. For a total achievable throughput, a single publish and a single author are able to achieve 1.6 TPS within an acceptable response time (those response times below 2 seconds). 2. For a total achievable concurrent user/thread count, a single publish instance is able to handle less than 10 concurrent threads/users performing continuous read operations and updates to maintain response times within SLAs (service-level agreements). 3. Scaling publish servers horizontally, in order to handle higher volumes of updates, is of no value since the bottleneck would lead to reverse replication to the author instance. (Throughput indicated above is for the entire publish layer and not for a single publish layer.) Adobes Social Collaboration can help to achieve social media goals and improve strategy, performance, and scalability. It is our hope that this paper has answered some of your questions and helped you better understand this particular social solution.

References 1. Q Planning and Capacity Guide C http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/managing/capacity-guide.html 2. CQ Hardware Sizing Guidelines http://wem.help.adobe.com/enterprise/en_US/10-0/wem/managing/hardware_sizing_ guidelines.html 3. Introduction to Adobes Social Communities http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/administering/social_communities.html

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sruthisagar Kasturirangan is an Infrastructure Architect, Infrastructure Practice, at SapientNitro Bangalore. A graduate from Iowa State University, he moved on to gain extensive experience within leading IT organizations and eventually moved back to his home country to join Sapient Corporation. He has over 11 years of experience in systems administration of Unix Platforms and Application Servers such as WebSphere and Weblogic, and intense exposure on capacity planning and performance tuning of Java Applications.

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