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Carl_Brothers's avatar
Carl_Brothers
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Oct 17, 2008

Netweaver portal and LTM

is there anything more substantial out there on what you can do for the SPA portal product? I have read and implemented most of what they have published in the netweaver deployment guide, but still feel that there should be more we can do to speed it up. Our deployment model is a centralized server farm that will deliver content globally. Internally we are hampered by having to deal with IE6 and all of it's inabilty to deal with compressed content very well.

 

 

Given our corporate standard for a browser I have challenged our SAP dev team to embrace some of the guidance that Steve Souders provided for improving HTTP performance. I am getting a significant amount of resistance at this point to applying minification to the the JS needed for the portal, which would give us our best improvement at this point. The SAP portal is very chatty and sets nearly everything to expire in the past, making it non-cachable unless you have the WA module.

 

 

Any additional guidance would be awesome.

 

 

Thanks,

 

 

Carl B
partner
sap

2 Replies

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  • Nojan_Moshiri_4's avatar
    Nojan_Moshiri_4
    Historic F5 Account
    Oct 17, 2008
    The WA module is certainly a big help for the portal. In some of my tests I've seen improvements that speed up the portal by twice as fast for certain operations. Perhaps the cost/value calculation will show that WA will pay off for your company.

     

     

    Short of that though, I'm wondering if you have compression turned up for javascript, it's not clear from your message.

     

     

    In order to enable compression, you would use an HTTP profile and add at least javascript mime type to the list, if not other mime-types, and then associate this profile with the virtual server. I've run all of my tests with IE6 and the compression improvements with javascript are definitely helpful.

     

     

    Also, have you tried taking advantage of RAM Cache in the HTTP profile as well? Some gains can be achieved for javascript as well by reducing one more hop and serving the files from the BIG-IP's memory instead of the SAP server's disk.

     

     

    I'm also wondering how your server loads are looking like? Is there more the BIG-IP can do to offload server load for you? Is one-connect turned on? Are you off-loading any SSL to the BIG-IP. Anything that can help the SAP server provide more cycles could help.
  • Nojan_Moshiri_1's avatar
    Nojan_Moshiri_1
    Historic F5 Account
    Oct 17, 2008
    Take a look at the "Deploying F5 with SAP NetWeaver and Enterprise SOA" Deployment Guide at http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/f5-sap-dg.pdf

     

     

    On page 15 or so, in the section about "Creating an HTTP Profile" you will find great instructions on enabling an http-wan-optimized-compression-caching profile specific to SAP. That should help with compression.

     

     

    The TCP profiles will also help if you haven't implemented that. That's detailed in the section immediately after the HTTP Profile.

     

     

    In terms of RAM Cache, I would experiment with turning on the "Insert Age Header" attribute in the profile, Enabling Cache and then manually entering the URIs of the most frequently used javascripts. Make sure the date and time on your BIG-IP LTM are correct and pointed at an NTP server. Then, you can use a browser plug-in such as HTTPWatch for IE, to test the download and response times before and after the change. You're correct that this isn't in the deployment guide.