Chapter 21. Performance Analysis and Tuning
By Clifford R. Cannon
In This Chapter
A small- to medium-sized BizTalk Server installation can work effectively on a single server machine without particular attention to performance tuning, using the default configuration. However, as the number and size of documents to be processed increase, so does the need for performance analysis and tuning as part of the development and deployment plan.
Because BizTalk Server uses SQL Server intensively to store complete documents and state information before, during, and after document processing, you must become familiar with how BizTalk uses databases to optimize the distribution of the workload. In larger installations, performance optimization often involves placing BizTalk Server and SQL Server on separate machines, so each machine can use all its resources for its part of the total task. Two of the databases, the Shared Queue and the Document Tracking databases, can be used so intensively in a high-traffic BizTalk installation that each database should be placed on its own dedicated SQL Server machine.
In addition to deploying separate servers for BizTalk and SQL Server, multiple BizTalk Server machines can be combined into a unified group of servers, all of which can take documents from the same message-processing queue and thereby balance the processing load across all machines in the group. To specialize the BizTalk servers even further, some machines in a server group can be dedicated to document-receive functions only, whereas other machines only process documents from the Shared Queue but do not receive document submissions from message senders.
While separating different BizTalk functions across multiple server machines, of course you will also want to scale the hardware of each machine for the desired performance. The speed and number of processors, size of physical memory, speed and layout of disk drives, and speed and configuration of network interfaces can significantly affect performance. In many cases, scaling the server hardware alone will increase the performance of a single-server installation enough to avoid the need to distribute the workload across several machines.
Finally, during system testing and after deployment, BizTalk Server provides many performance counters you can use with Windows System Monitor to measure and tune the performance of your BizTalk installation. Other Windows tools, such as the Defrag-menter and the Alerter, can maintain your installations performance at optimum levels and can notify administrators of system problems as—or even before—they occur.