The UCF feature in Documentum seems to be a necessary evil. I have had more complaints from our users regarding UCF than any other Documentum component.
The most common complaint is – It is DAMN slow to launch!!
I agree with the users. Launching UCF in our organization’s environment takes around 50-70 seconds!!!
Imagine that you read around 20 documents at different times in the day and every time you want to read a document, you have to wait for 50 seconds. Can you imagine the wait while your browser displays a blank page? No wonder the users complain about this.
After running several rounds of tests, we identified the factors that cause these really slow response times.
1) UCF uses Java JRE 1.5.x. JRE needs time to initialize itself and load into memory before UCF kicks into action. On a laptop with 1GB RAM and a reasonably fast CPU, JRE takes around 20-30 seconds to launch.
2) Another key factor is the presence of Anti-virus software on the user’s laptop. Since AV will scan all the JRE related .jar files, the JRE initialization will be further slowed slowed down.
From our tests, (Only the first operation after browser restart takes this long. Next operations should finish between 10-15 seconds)
- Export operation using UCF with Anti-virus takes around 50-70 seconds
- When Anti-virus is turned off, the Export operation takes around 35-45 seconds.
Some suggestions:
- Tune your anti-virus settings to exclude JRE folders and UCF folders
- Exclude anti-virus from scanning into .zip and archive files
- TEST with various settings
Here are some of the other common problems with UCF:
- JRE gets updated automatically when a new update is available from sun.com. Sometimes this breaks the UCF. Solution could be to try deleting all the UCF related folders and files in UCF folder (usually found in C:\Documents and Settings\Documentum\ucf)
Customers who are planning to use Documentum should test the performance of UCF in their environment.
1) Setup a pilot environment on a test server. Access Webtop from a typical end-user PC and check the response times. Make sure you are running anti-virus and any other software that are standard to your environment. This is one way to ensure that the system performance will be acceptable to the end-users.
2) If you are planning to conduct any peformance testing and load testing, ensure that you specify that some scenarios include testing with UCF enabled.
September 2, 2008 at 7:53 am |
Hi,
Good article and some nice tips about testing, and setting up AV correctly.
For info, D6.5 has considerably better UCF performance. The JRE is initialised on user login to Webtop and persists. Therefore the”lag” on document download is much, much less. On local testing on a laptop, if I have (say) Word or Acrobat already open, then select a PDF/DOC (say 250Kb) to view in Webtop it almost instantly opens in the native application.
My laptop is running Sophos AV BTW and is not setup to ignore any files.
FROM THE WHAT’S NEW IN 6.5 PDF:
————————————–
UCF performance improvements in Webtop
UCF content transfer is more usable and performs better. The following lists the UCF
enhancements for Documentum 6.5:
• Reduction in the number of round trips between the UCF client and server. This feature is especially effective for improving transfer performance for smaller files over a high latency WAN.
• The following UCF client initialization/startup improvements:
— Sharing a JVM instance across multiple web sessions
— Starting JVM upon login
• Support for PDF byte streaming through a native viewer.
• Use of parallel streams to increase content transfer rate. This feature is especially effective for improving content transfer performance of large files over a high latency WAN (outbound and inbound).
• Freeing up stuck threads to optimize resources and increase concurrency.
• Reduction in unnecessary WDK UCF client calls.
Content transfer dialog
———————–
An improved content transfer dialog shows the action that is running (in the header of the dialog), the file which is transferring at the time, and progress of that transfer. The new dialog is easier to understand and is similar to other applications with which a user may be familiar
September 2, 2008 at 8:07 am |
Hi Jed,
Thanks for sharing the information. I have heard about the improvements in D6.5. Unfortunately these improvements are not ported to D6 SP1. So organizations who have recently upgraded to D6 will face the UCF lag issues.
I came to know that efforts are ongoing to port the D6.5 performance enhancements to D6 SP1 and provide a hot-fix. Lets see how that goes.
As you know the problem of this lag is mostly due to JRE initialization. But to the end-user who just wants to use Documentum, the lag is perceived to be with Documentum. Hopefully the future version of Sun JRE will launch faster…
cheers
September 2, 2008 at 9:01 am |
Yeah, I’m running with a local JRE of 1.6.07 and seems faster, although this may just be the different way UCF/JRE is now initialised… anything that makes Documentum seem faster is most welcome!
November 6, 2008 at 10:49 pm |
Hi there,
I’ve never had to test this setting (didn’t have to use it as we have acceptable performance on a D6SP1 platform) but there is some client.engine.timeout setting in the ucf.client.config.xml that one can use to keep the ucf java process awake for more than the default 1 minute setting. Now it must be that the java process is stopped if you close your internet explorer window (did not test that).
Cheers,
Stephane
January 28, 2009 at 9:36 pm |
Hi,
I’ve a strange situation. MS Word 2007 works good with application connector D6.5. But when using MS Word 2003 I get the “ucf session wait timeout” error.
Any idea? Thanks in advance.
regards,
Anton
January 29, 2009 at 2:17 pm |
Hi Anton,
I dont use App connectors much so I won’t be able to help you much.
Just a thought – were you able to reproduce this behaviour of Office 2007 and Office 2003 with Webtop running on your local PC? That could help to identify if the problem is with Office product or if some proxy/webserver redirection is causing this issue.
cheers.
Ram