Optimizing the login time for web applications

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This topic is shared by BAW, CP4BA. Last updated on 2025-03-13 12:15

To help improve performance, you can reduce the time that a user spends logging in to web applications, including Process Portal. For this purpose, you set the user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration configuration property to a number of minutes under which that user's membership to user groups is not recalculated.

About this task

When a user logs in to IBM® Business Automation Workflow web applications such as the Process Portal, group membership is recalculated and can be cached for that user on the database. This process might significantly affect performance because it can take up to several seconds, depending on how many user groups are registered to the system. Moreover, any interaction from the user is blocked while the group memberships are calculated. See also, Specifying that members of a group member cache are retrieved from the database.

When a user logs in and out several times within a period, or logs in to different applications, the group memberships are refreshed each time. To help improve performance, you can use the user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration configuration property to specify the amount of time, in minutes, after which the calculation of user group membership is repeated. For example, if the user logs in and out and in again to Process Portal, and if the time that elapsed since the first login is shorter than the specified number of minutes, the group memberships are not recalculated on the second login.

The default value is 1 minute. If you set this property to -1, user group memberships are never refreshed upon login. Specify this value only when specific administration procedures regularly refresh group memberships. For more information about group membership synchronization, see Synchronizing group membership by users.

For more information about customizing configuration properties, see The 100Custom.xml file and configuration.

Procedure

To set this property to false in the 100Custom.xml files, complete the following steps:

Stop the servers for Workflow Server and Workflow Center.
Open the 100Custom.xml file and overwrite the value for the user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration property.
The following XML example specifies an expiration time of 20 minutes:
```
<common merge="mergeChildren">
  <security merge="mergeChildren">
    <user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration merge="replace">20</user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration>
  </security>
</common>
```
In this example, "20" was chosen because it is the default value for WebSphere®'s VMM cache timeouts. To get the value for your environment, use the WebSphere Console to check your "Cache times out" values for your LDAP repositories.

Global Security > Federatred repositories>[your-repository] > Performance

Choose a value for user-group-membership-sync-cache-expiration at least as large as the largest timeout and convert the seconds to minutes: 1200 seconds = 20 minutes.
Save your changes to each 100Custom.xml file.
Restart the servers for Workflow Server and Workflow Center.