Technical Tips and Tricks

This document gives hints and tips about different Audience issues, and describes how to improve Audience performance if the end user experiences bad response times.

Configuring IIS 6.0

This section describes various tips for improving Internet Information Server 6.0 performance.

Identifying Performance settings

To be able to view the IIS performance setting, you first need to determine which Application pool Audience is running under. And then open the Properties dialog for the Application pool:

1. In the IIS Manager go to the Virtual Directory (web directory) of your Audience installation, right click and select Properties. A similar screen to that below would then appear

2. Identify the Application pool, as shown in the red box above.

3. Open the properties dialog for the Application pool to view the performance settings by right clicking the selected application pool and selecting properties:

Configuring Performance Settings

This is a quick guide for setting recommended Application pool properties:

Recycling properties

Use this tab to administrate the recycling of worker processes. In worker process isolation mode, you can configure IIS to periodically restart worker processes in an application pool, allowing you to manage precisely those worker processes that are faulty. This ensures that specified applications in those pools remain healthy, and that system resources can be recovered.

We recommend that the default settings, as shown in the dialog below, are used.

Performance properties

Use this tab to configure the way that Internet Information Services (IIS) shuts down idle worker processes, and the number of requests waiting to be processed.

Idle timeout limits helps conserve system resources by terminating unused worker processes by gracefully closing idle processes after a specified idle duration. This allows you to better manage the resources on particular computers when the processing load is heavy, when identified applications consistently fall into an idle state, or when new processing space is not available.

If you are running a web server with heavy load you should monitor what idle timeout best matches your applications. If running only Audience on the web server, this time should be set to unlimited, as shown in the dialog below (1).

If running several web applications on your server that compete over the same resources you should consider increasing the number of worker processes (2. below)

Country Data Issue

NB! This issue is only a problem on SuperOffice CRM 5 databases, and not for SuperOffice SIX databases.

Problem Description

To make it faster for Audience and NetServer to look for countries in the SuperOffice database an ISO number for countries are inserted into the unused UpdatedCount column in the Country table. This is done the first time the Country table is accessed by NetServer. This ISO number is often used by web applications, and therefore necessary for Audience.

A problem occurs when the Audience system user do not have sufficient permissions to update the country table. NetServer will try to update the data with the Audience system user, but when denied it will retry until a timeout occurs and then continue.

The consequence of this is an unacceptable long start-up time for Audience each time the Audience application restarts or has been idle for a period of time. Usually web servers will stop idle web sites after a given period of time (see the chapter Recycling properties above), and restart them when the first user accesses the site again.

As stated above this data is missing and inserted in the 5.6 database. The SIX database has these data inserted during database creation or upgrade from 5.6.

Problem Solution

Since Audience is run with its own Audience System user, this user needs the sufficient rights to update the Country table with the new data. Hence, the solution to the problem is to give the Audience user update privileges on the country table.

How to do this on a Microsoft SQL Server database is described below:

First start the Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

Locate the "Tables" catalogue of your SuperOffice database. Right-click the country table and select Properties.

Select "Permissions…" and give the Audience user UPDATE permissions on the country table.

Audience should now have sufficient rights to update the country table.

Click "OK" to close the dialogs.

Enable Logging in Audience

To monitor the Audience database traffic or detect problems it is possible to turn on quite extensive logging.

This can be done with the Audience/NetServer Configuration Wizard.

Run netserver_config.bat in the Audience installation folder to start the configuration wizard.

Click "Next" until you get to the Log Settings.

Select the 'Log to folder' option and select a folder where you want to log to.

Usually you would only log Errors but for extensive usage monitoring you can add additional logging, but be aware that this will make an impact on performance.

Set Write Permissions on the Log Folder

The web server needs permission to write to the log folder. The web server usually runs under the local ASPNET user, hence you should give this user write and modify privileges to the log folder.

Go to the log folder, right click it and select Properties:

Go to the security tab and click Add…

In the Select Users or Groups dialog type \ASPNET and click Check Names. Then click OK to add the user.

Give the user Allow privileges for Write and Modify. Click OK.

Run Audience and see that there is written a log file to your log folder.