BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator's Guide
Increasing on-demand viewing capacity for Crystal reports
When you provide many users with View On Demand access to reports, you allow each user to view live report data by refreshing reports against your database server. For most requests, the Page Server retrieves the data and performs the report processing, and the Cache Server stores recently viewed report pages for possible reuse. However, if users use the Advanced DHTML viewer, the Report Application Server (RAS) processes the request.
If your reporting requirements demand that users have continual access to the latest data, you can increase capacity in the following ways:
- Increase the maximum allowed size of the cache. For details, see "Modifying Cache Server performance settings" on page 109.
- Verify the efficiency of your reports. When designing reports in Crystal Reports, there are a number of ways in which you can improve the performance of the report itself, by modifying record selection formulas, using the database server's resources to group data, incorporating parameter fields, and so on. For more information, see the "Designing Optimized Web Reports" section in the Crystal Reports User's Guide (version 8.5 and later).
- Increase the number of Page Servers that service requests on behalf of Cache Servers. You can do this by installing additional Page Servers on multiple machines. However, do not install more than one Page Server per machine. The Page Server has been re-designed to optimize the processing capability of a machine. It is therefore no longer recommended that you install multiple Page Servers on one machine.
- Increase the number of Page Servers, Cache Servers, and Report Application Servers on the system, and then distribute the processing load through the use of server groups. For instance, you might create two server groups, each containing one or more Cache Server/Page Server pairs along with one or more Report Application Servers. You can then specify individual reports that should always be processed by a particular server group.