Tuning: Overview and Best Practices

To get the best performance out of your MicroStrategy system, you must be familiar with the characteristics of your system and how it performs under different conditions. In addition to this, you need a plan for tuning the system. For example, you should have a base record of certain key configuration settings and performance measures, such as Enterprise Manager reports or diagnostics logs, before you begin experimenting with those settings. Make one change at a time and test the system performance. Compare the new performance to the base and see if it improved. If it did not improve, change the setting back to its previous value. This way, when system performance improves, you know which change is responsible.

The specifications of the machines that you use to run Intelligence Server, how you tune those machines, and how they are used depend on the number of users, number of concurrently active users, their usage patterns, and so on. MicroStrategy provides up-to-date recommendations for these areas on the MicroStrategy Knowledge Base.

As a high-level overview of tuning the system, you should first define your system requirements, and then configure the system's design using those requirements. The following topics lay the foundation for the specific tuning guidelines that make up the rest of this section.