Slow System: Symptoms, Causes, and Resolution

You may find that your Sterling B2B Integrator is working slowly because of a variety of reasons.

An increase in volume or improperly designed business process may cause slower than expected performance.

The symptoms of a slow system include:
  • Slow transaction processing
  • Unusually long delay in starting a business process
  • Unusually large number of business processes waiting in the queues
  • Slow user interface log in
  • Slow business process searches
  • Slow system services, such as indexing and purging
  • Slow user interface performance

Potential Causes of a Slow System

A slow system can be caused by many areas of your system and the in which way you are implementing Sterling B2B Integrator.

Potential causes of a slow system include:
  • Improperly designed business processes.
  • Various system services being turned off. For more information about turning off system services, refer to the topic "Disabled Service".
  • Improperly tuned performance properties. For more information about tuning performance properties, refer to the topic "Improperly Tuned Performance Properties".

Determining the Cause of a Slow System

To determine the cause of a slow system, complete some, if not all, the following tasks, depending on your situation:
  • Review your operating system and database performance if other applications are using these resources. If other applications using the same resources are slow, it indicates that the performance issue is not specific to Sterling B2B Integrator. Review your operating system or database applications for performance issues.
  • Review the log files for errors and processing information. If your system is slow, good places to start troubleshooting are the system.log and the noapp.log in the install_dir/logs directory.

    For more information about logs and system information, refer to the topic Managing System Logs and Reviewing System Information.

  • Review the Sterling B2B Integrator Internal System Statistics Report by navigating to Operations > System > Performance > Statistics.

    This report shows the number of invocations and the processing time taken for each business process and system activity. You can use this information to identify activities that are slowing down and impacting performance.

    For more information, refer to the topic Manage Performance Statistics.

  • Perform a thread dump to identify business process bottlenecks in Sterling B2B Integrator.

    For more information about thread dumps, refer to the topic Conducting a Thread Dump.

Resolving a Slow System

A system may have slowed down because of the following reasons:
  • Improperly Designed Business Processes
  • Disabled Service
  • Improperly Tuned Performance Properties

Improperly Designed Business Processes

Improperly designed business processes can cause performance issues with Sterling B2B Integrator. These issues can be averted or resolved by implementing well-designed business processes.

Disabled Service

If a service that Sterling B2B Integrator uses for processing is disabled, the following issues may arise:
  • Business processes may start to fail or wait until the service becomes available.
  • Indexing, archiving, or purging activities may not occur, causing the database to fill up.

Both these issues cause your system to run slowly.

For example, if the index service is disabled, the data in the database cannot be flagged for archiving or purging. If the index service is disabled, archiving and purging activities may run, but no data is archived or purged. This results in the database storing too much information and slowing your system.

To resolve this issue, start the disabled service.

Improperly Tuned Performance Properties

Sterling B2B Integrator may run slowly if you have not tuned the system performance using the Performance Tuning Utility or have manually tuned the system performance in the install_dir/properties/noapp.properties file.

To resolve this, you may have to make changes to the appropriate performance tuning properties either manually or using the Performance Tuning Utility. For more information about performance tuning, refer to Performance Tuning Utility or Manual Performance Tuning.