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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Performance
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce 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 HCL Commerce deployment.
Tuning
an HCL 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.
Tuning best practices
Use these tips and best practices to help you successfully work with Workspaces and HCL Commerce Search, deploy HCL Commerce, and develop reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework.
Use the Commerce-specific tag for bean activation
HCL Commerce data beans require activation prior to their use. HCL Commerce provides a Commerce-specific version of the useBean tag, <wcbase:useBean>, that performs data bean activation in Java-free manner and is the recommended method of data bean activation in store JSP pages.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce 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 HCL 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.
    - 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.
    - Application server considerations
      HCL Commerce is ultimately another Java 2 application that runs on top of WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Liberty. As a result, WebSphere Application Server acts as the operating system for HCL Commerce. Optimizing the application servers optimized improves the performance of HCL Commerce.
    - JDBC_MONITOR_ENABLED parameter
      JDBC Monitor (Java Database Connectivity) is a debugging tool that allows you to examine SQLs that are executed in any application for performance and troubleshooting purposes. This document provides the installation steps for JDBC Monitor.
    - Tuning
      an HCL 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.
      - HCL Commerce performance tuning
        HCL Commerce by itself does not have too many performance tuning knobs. Consider HCL 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 HCL Commerce perform well.
      - Tuning best practices
        Use these tips and best practices to help you successfully work with Workspaces and HCL Commerce Search, deploy HCL Commerce, and develop reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework.
        Workspaces best practices
        When you use workspaces, you should have strong business processes in place to prevent the situations outlined in Workspaces limitations and restrictions.
        HCL Commerce JSP programming best practices
        This section offers the following selection of JSP programming best practices, which promote development of reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework:
        Use JSTL in place of Java code
        JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) is a collection of JSP tags that provide standard functionality most commonly sought by JSP page authors. JSTL has support for conditions, iteration, locale-sensitive formatting, and so forth. It also has an expression language (EL) that allows page authors to control how data is retrieved and displayed.
        Use the Commerce-specific tag for bean activation
        HCL Commerce data beans require activation prior to their use. HCL Commerce provides a Commerce-specific version of the useBean tag, <wcbase:useBean>, that performs data bean activation in Java-free manner and is the recommended method of data bean activation in store JSP pages.
        Use Commerce-specific maps to access request parameters
        HCL Commerce provides the following Commerce-specific versions of the implicit JSP objects param and paramValues to facilitate access to decrypted HTTP request parameters:
        Use the StoreErrorDataBean data bean for error handling
        To display store-specific error messages in JSP pages, use the StoreErrorDataBean data bean.
        Use an appropriate inclusion mechanism
        JSP supports two inclusion mechanisms: Static include and Dynamic include.
        Use the .jspf extension for JSP segments
        A JSP page can consist of one or more files: for example, the file containing a top-level JSP page, several files containing dynamically included JSP pages, and several files containing statically included JSP segments. Unlike the top-level or dynamically included pages, JSP segments need not be legal JSP pages and thus may not compile properly.
        Use the escapeXml attribute to preserve HTML formatting
        By default, the value of the escapeXml attribute of the JSTL <c:out> tag is true. This default behavior ensures that HTML special characters, such as <, >, &, ', or ", contained in output strings are converted into their corresponding character entity codes and displayed properly in the HTML page produced by the JSP page. In some common HCL Commerce store scenarios, however, this behavior is counterproductive. One such scenario is the display of prices in globalized stores:
        Ensure XHTML-compliance
        JSTL and HTML elements of your JSP pages should conform to the W3C XHTML standard and recommendations.
        Use the post method for form submission
        Data can be sent from client to server by way of an HTML form using either the get or the post method. Servlets can handle either method properly by appropriately parsing and decoding the incoming request. In general, use of the post method is recommended due to the following reasons:
      - HCL Commerce default tunables
        HCL Commerce has two instance profiles, Test and Production. Each profile contains its own tunable values for the HCL Commerce application servers, including Java virtual machines (JVMs), cache, and others. 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
        Consider these search performance tuning hints and tips when you administer HCL Commerce Search.
      - Database performance tuning
        The database is usually one of the potential areas for bottlenecks that makes HCL 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 HCL Commerce as a starting point. The information in the JVM performance tuning topic is specific to the IBM JDK.
      - Promotion performance tuning
        HCL 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.
      - Enabling and disabling large shopping cart performance enhancements
        The large shopping cart performance enhancement consists of many different elements, which can be enabled or disabled separately. The enhancements are disabled by default.
      - Enabling and disabling the optimized large shopping cart order commands
        To improve the performance of large shopping carts, you can optimize the OrderItemAdd, OrderItemUpdate, OrderItemDisplay, and OrderCalculate commands.
      - Enabling and disabling the optimized tax command
        The optimized tax command provides improved performance for sites that encounter shopping carts that include hundreds of order items or more.
      - Enabling and disabling the optimized shipping calculation command
        The optimized shipping calculation command provides improved performance for sites that encounter shopping carts that include hundreds of order items or more.
  - Setting cache providers
    Starting with HCL Commerce Version 9.1, all caches are automatically configured to use the HCL Cache. However, the cache provider for each cache can be set to use the DynaCache provider, or the WebSphere Extreme Scale DynaCache provider.
  - HCL Cache
    The HCL Cache integrates with DynaCache and improves performance and scalability with features such as remote caching, real-time monitoring, and auto-tuning capabilities.
  - Experiments considerations
    When experiments that you have created in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator are running in the store, the Scheduler launches a job that determines whether any of the current experiments have expired. The job compares the expiration date specified in the experiment to the current system date. When an experiment is identified as expired, its status is updated in the database, and the experiment is prevented from displaying to customers.
  - Website performance tuning
    There are four steps for evaluating performance of an HCL Commerce website that is based on Transaction server.
  - Tuning the price rule object cache
    You can improve performance by changing the size of the cache used to store price rule business objects during storefront runtime.
  - Data Load utility performance tuning
    Scheduled Data Load utility jobs can affect HCL Commerce performance. You can reduce the impact of this process by tuning the data load performance appropriately for your implementation.
  - Workspaces performance tuning
    Workspaces use database views instead of tables to retrieve data. Retrieval of underlying data might be more time-consuming because of the complexity of SQL statements that are used in workspace view definitions.
  - Configuring custom DynaCache objects in WebSphere Liberty
    The WebSphere Liberty profile, can be configured with distributed map for the custom cache objects. To configure the custom cache objects for WebSphere Liberty in Runtime and Development, follow the steps outlined below:
  - Configuring custom DynaCache objects in HCL Commerce
    Define the custom cache in WebSphere Application Server. You can then use the cache name to store and retrieve the cache objects.
  - Preparing HCL 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 HCL Commerce environment for peak efficiency, and to ensure that your HCL Commerce site is ready to handle the increased load.
  - OneTest Performance sample script for Emerald B2C Store
    HCL OneTest provides software testing tools to support a DevOps approach: API testing, functional testing, UI testing, performance testing and service virtualization. This approach aids in test automation, for earlier and more frequent discovery of errors.
  - Ruby store performance tuning
    Performance tuning in the Ruby store is important for delivering the best browsing experience. If your storefront is slow, you can improve its performance by checking and optimizing the following points.
  - Docker performance tuning
    The following performance tuning information can be used to help you configure your containerized HCL Commerce environments for optimal performance.
  - Thread Monitor - Yaml configuration file
    The Thead Monitor tool gathers thread dumps and Javacores at a configured interval, and during events such as high WebContainer/Default_Executor pool thread usage. Yaml configuration file must exist with name /SETUP/support/thread_monitor.yaml, or under the location specified with the THREAD_MONITOR_CFG environment variable.
  - Search health check
    The search health check API is used to regularly check the status of Commerce containers to make sure they are in a healthy state.
  - Elasticsearch performance tuning
    You have numerous options when tuning the performance of NiFi and Elasticsearch. The following guide introduces tools for monitoring performance and validating key tuning parameters, and provides a performance tuning strategy that you can use with the component.
  - Optimizing index build and overall flow
    Optmizations are provided full index builds and for tuning parameters. Potential improvements that can be implimented for Near Real Time (NRT) index updates are not described.
  - Monitoring the metrics
    You can use Grafana and related tools to analyze the performance of the Ingest pipeline, and Kibana to do the same with Elasticsearch.
  - Tunable setup parameters
    How you can modify the values for the tunable parameters, and some default values and how they can be improved in different circumstances.
  - Scaling and hardware requirements
    You can achieve additional capacity by implementing or extending pod clustering on Elasticsearch, NiFi, or both. You can also consider the hardware footprint and key resources that impact the processing and index creation speed.
  - Elasticsearch with dedicated Auth and Live nodes
    For production environments, Elasticsearch is recommended in a clustered configuration for high availability and scalability considerations.
  - Recommended parameter values
    Two configurationsof the NiFi tunable parameter values are presented, a minimal and an optimal value.
  - Measurement
    As each deployment of HCL 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.
  - Emerald REST Caching On TS Server for Commerce 9.1
    Emerald Store is powered by the REST framework, and the cache is implemented using a REST servlet.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

JSP programming best practice: Use the Commerce-specific tag for bean activation

HCL Commerce data beans require activation prior to their use. HCL Commerce provides a Commerce-specific version of the useBean tag, <wcbase:useBean>, that performs data bean activation in Java-free manner and is the recommended method of data bean activation in store JSP pages.

As an example, the generic way of activating a category data bean is as follows:

<jsp:useBean id="categoryBean"
class="com.ibm.commerce.catalog.beans.CategoryDataBean">
  <%
com.ibm.commerce.beans.DataBeanManager.activate(categoryBean,
request, response); %>         
</jsp:useBean>

The recommended way of accomplishing the same task in HCL Commerce store pages is as follows:

<wcbase:useBean id="categoryBean"
classname="com.ibm.commerce.catalog.beans.CategoryDataBean" />

Note: Data bean activation can fail and cause an exceptional condition. To comply with the JavaServer Pages Specification requirement that no output be written to the output stream when forwarding to other Web assets, including error pages, data beans should be activated at the beginning of the JSP page.