Cache server installation

This content applies to version 7.2.1 or later. You can use a cache server to improve the performance for users who work remotely. The cache server is a separate installation. You can install the cache server at anytime, even months or years later. These instructions are for administrators who plan to install the cache server.

The cache server is available only in the Rational® Synergy 7.2.1 release.

The performance of Rational Synergy is greatly impacted by some of the system processes, such as copying and updating projects that contain many files from the server to the client work area. When these processes run, the system is slow for the users. Slow performance issues are common in deployment environments when the Rational Synergy core server that is hosting these file objects is in a remote location to the clients. Also, these clients can be in a different network across a WAN. In a typical production environment, the web-based Rational Synergy runarea is distributed across multiple subnets, where the core server and each group of associated clients are in their respective subnets.

Rational Synergy file objects that are copied from the Rational Synergy core server to the client work area can be static and non-static. Static objects, which are the major part of project members, do not change over time. Therefore, they are good candidates for caching to reduce the copy operation time. Initially, when the cache server is empty and a client updates, copies, or syncs projects, the data is also populated in the locally deployed and configured cache server. All subsequent copies, updates, and syncs for the remaining co-located users fetch the data from the local cache server instead of the Rational Synergy main server. Therefore, the performance is faster. However, the first client that updates, copies, or syncs projects when the cache repository is empty experiences a delay in completing the operation because the cache needs to be populated. The benefit of performance improvement due to local caching for the remaining co-located team far outweighs this delay for the first client.

When you use a cache server, the Rational Synergy core server performance improves because the core server memory is used for other processes.

Before you install your cache server, read all of the topics in these sections to ensure that you understand the requirements:

Supported platforms

The supported platforms for the cache server are the same platforms that are supported by the Rational Synergy 7.2.1 main server and the client. See the Readme topic for the list of supported systems.

Disk space requirements

The cache server installation requires 800 MB of space for the cache server runarea. For the cache server repository, the required space depends on the database size of the main server.

Cleaning objects in the cache server repository

Run the utility script to clean objects in the cache server repository. For details, see the "Client cache clean utility for Cache server" document at http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27040369.


Feedback