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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Performance
Methodology
Like site security, a proper approach to site performance requires planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. The following collections of topics describe each phase of this process, and contain the recommended considerations, and best practices for getting the most out of your WebSphere Commerce deployment.
Tuning
A WebSphere Commerce deployment is made up of many individual parts that work together to provide the e-commerce experience. By default, each part is configured to provide a base level of performance. However, individual changes can be made to potentially gain extra performance. The following collection of topics provides details on how to make these performance changes to the individual components of your site.
Search performance tuning
There are several search performance tuning hints and tips to consider when administering WebSphere Commerce Search.
Disabling summary tables
Summary tables are used to optimize the performance of WebSphere Commerce searching. If you are not using the search feature in the AuroraESite starter store, you can disable the summary tables to save some database resources. The summary tables cannot be disabled in the AuroraESite starter store.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  - Performance enhancements
    Learn about the new features and functions that are offered by WebSphere Commerce Version 8 to improve your site performance.
  - Methodology
    Like site security, a proper approach to site performance requires planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. The following collections of topics describe each phase of this process, and contain the recommended considerations, and best practices for getting the most out of your WebSphere Commerce deployment.
    - Design phase
      During the design phase of your project, it is important to consider performance priorities. It is important to design a solution that has a good balance of features and performance consideration, build a performance test environment, and begin to deploy tools that are required to support your performance strategy. It is also important to identify architecture limitations that might change a non-functional requirement.
    - Development phase
      During the development phase, it is important to measure the response time of business critical steps in the development environment.
    - Testing phase
      During the testing phase, it is important to start with simple, common test cases and gradually go to more complex scenarios and environment configurations. Other priorities include measuring the performance of the application as load scales up to projected peak and identifying and resolving the root causes of resource constraints and application bottlenecks.
    - Maintenance phase
      Post-launch, during the maintenance phase, instrument and monitor performance indicators in the production environment to enable the team to proactively identify and address potential issues before users are affected. Priorities also include fostering communication between marketing, performance, and operation teams to be better prepared for promotional events. And using the data that is captured from production to optimize planning for future marketing and promotional activities.
    - Operating system considerations
      Make sure that your system meets the minimum operating system requirements. In a production environment with numerous concurrent users, multiple processors help increase performance. In addition to using faster processors to speed up most operations, there are other areas to consider when you want to improve operating system performance.
    - Web server considerations
      Even though the web server is a mature technology, it can still be tuned to get better performance, especially on large websites. This section covers the common performance considerations for all the web servers, and is operating system independent.
    - WebSphere Application Server considerations
      WebSphere Commerce Server is ultimately another Java 2 application that runs on top of WebSphere Application Server. As a result, WebSphere Application Server acts as the operating system for WebSphere Commerce. Having the WebSphere Application Server properly optimized improves the performance of WebSphere Commerce.
    - Tuning
      A WebSphere Commerce deployment is made up of many individual parts that work together to provide the e-commerce experience. By default, each part is configured to provide a base level of performance. However, individual changes can be made to potentially gain extra performance. The following collection of topics provides details on how to make these performance changes to the individual components of your site.
      - WebSphere Commerce performance tuning
        WebSphere Commerce by itself does not have too many performance tuning knobs. Consider WebSphere Commerce to be a Java EE application that consists of business logic and relies on WebSphere Application Server to provide the core function to make WebSphere Commerce perform well.
      - Tuning best practices
        Use these tips and best practices to help you successfully work with Workspaces and WebSphere Commerce Search, deploy WebSphere Commerce, and develop reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the WebSphere Commerce store development framework.
      - WebSphere Commerce default tunables
        WebSphere Commerce Version 8 has two instance profiles, Test and Production. Each profile contains its own tunable values for the WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Commerce Search Java virtual machines (JVM) and WebSphere Application Server caches. These values are in place to provide a standard base level of performance from which to operate, or tweak for improvements to individual configurations.
      - Search performance tuning
        There are several search performance tuning hints and tips to consider when administering WebSphere Commerce Search.
        Enabling the Solr administrative interface
        You can monitor Solr in WebSphere Commerce Search using the Solr administrative interface. The Solr native administrative interface can be used to gather runtime statistics for each Solr core that is running on the search server. It can also be used to perform simple search queries.
        Guidelines to improve faceted navigation performance
        Facet filtering introduces many permutations to products displayed to the user. The large variety can significantly reduce cache hit ratio and increase server utilization as more results must be rendered rather than served from cache.
        Search and Marketing statistics in WebSphere Commerce
        In a typical deployment model, business users typically do not have access to the production system. However, for business users to review live production data, such as search and marketing statistics, it is required that the data be replicated into a staging or authoring environment to be viewed in the Management Center. The production system is not impacted by the data replication operation because it is the staging or authoring system that pulls the production data back into the staging database, without involving any production CPU cycles.
        Management Center search tables
        The Management Center is a search intensive application, and you can tune your database to improve search performance if you know the tables and columns it uses.
        Disabling summary tables
        Summary tables are used to optimize the performance of WebSphere Commerce searching. If you are not using the search feature in the AuroraESite starter store, you can disable the summary tables to save some database resources. The summary tables cannot be disabled in the AuroraESite starter store.
        Disabling the remote Business Context Service (BCS) call
        You can disable the remote BCS call to avoid deadlock issues during searches in the storefront.
        Tuning search relevancy
        You can fine-tune search relevancy using Solr and WebSphere Commerce-side indexing and querying features.
        Tuning Index Load
        You can tune Index Load for optimal performance by configuring the tunable values and evaluating the results.
        Tuning product grouping
        The product grouping feature is based on the Solr field collapsing and result grouping query feature. There might be performance impacts when you enable product grouping. Consider the factors that influence performance impacts and how to design and tune to minimize the impact. It is recommended that you assess the business requirements for the affected store pages, as some of the configurations might change the search results being returned.
        Optimizing Search Results in Hebrew Language Stores
        For optimal catalog search results when your catalog includes data in the Hebrew language, generate a catalog-specific dictionary. The default catalog is not optimized for Hebrew-language catalog items. You can use the createTokens.db2.sh script to build a catalog dictionary that is properly optimized for Hebrew storefronts. If you catalog does not include Hebrew data, running this script does not affect the quality of search results.
        Creating a dedicated thread pool for WebSphere Commerce REST requests
        If you plan to use the Search Rule or Mixed Mode pricing features, a dedicated thread pool is needed to prevent a deadlock in requests between the WebSphere Commerce and Search servers.
      - Database performance tuning
        The database is usually one of the potential areas for bottlenecks that makes WebSphere Commerce unable to scale and perform well. It is therefore crucial that the database is tuned appropriately for your implementation.
      - JVM performance tuning
        For improved performance, JVM settings require careful tuning. Tune your JVM settings to avoid experiencing memory allocation errors. The symptoms for these errors can vary from intermittent performance problems to the periodic failure and restart of the JVM. Consider the default JVM settings set by WebSphere Commerce as a starting point. The information in the JVM performance tuning topic is specific to the IBM JDK.
      - Promotion performance tuning
        WebSphere Commerce provides business users with multiple features and functionality to help enhance developing promotions for a store. However, planning is required to use the various techniques available to achieve and maintain wanted site performance.
      - Marketing performance tuning
        The Management Center Marketing tool provides business users with many features to help enhance site and store marketing activities. Planning is required to use the various caching techniques available to achieve and maintain your optimal site performance.
      - Performance improvements for large shopping cart
        The following shopping cart commands have been optimized for performance: OrderItemAdd, OrderItemUpdate, OrderItemDisplay. These changes optimize the commands so that performance gains can be achieved, especially in cases where shopping carts typically contain hundreds of order items.
      - Website performance tuning
        There are four steps for evaluating performance of a WebSphere Commerce website that is based on WebSphere Commerce Server.
      - Data Load utility performance tuning
        Scheduled Data Load utility jobs can affect WebSphere Commerce performance. You can reduce the impact of this process by tuning the data load performance appropriately for your implementation.
      - Preparing WebSphere Commerce for the peak shopping periods
        When preparing for peak shopping periods, such as the holiday season, use the following best practices to effectively manage your WebSphere Commerce environment for peak efficiency, and to ensure that your WebSphere Commerce site is ready to handle the increased load.
    - Measurement
      As each deployment of WebSphere Commerce is different, a measured approach to modifying your defaults must be taken to successfully tune your site. The following collection of topics provides details on how to measure and troubleshoot site performance.
- Troubleshooting

Disabling summary tables

Summary tables are used to optimize the performance of WebSphere Commerce searching. If you are not using the search feature in the AuroraESite starter store, you can disable the summary tables to save some database resources. The summary tables cannot be disabled in the AuroraESite starter store.

Procedure

To disable the summary tables:

Open Configuration Manager.
In Configuration Manager, select the Instance, then select Search Configuration.
Select the Schema Optimization tab.
Ensure that all check boxes are cleared, then click Apply.