UBE (PDF Viewing) Performance in E1 9.0 over WAN

ptravis

Member
We are currently in the planning, build, retrofit and unit test stages of an upgrade project from XE upd 5 to E19.0/T8.98. Our operation is centralized and runs 70 locations (3000+ users, 1000 max) globally and we are having concerns rolling 9.0 out with a web client. Though we still have some further tuning to do, our interactive performance doesn't seem too bad however the viewing of "larger" PDFs from UBEs is somewhat horrendous.
Anybody got any good ideas, experience or alternative approaches as to how to handle / improve this. We are trying to avoid going down the citrix path, however understand this may be our fallback position. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
 
Hi Paul

You just stumbled into one of the shortcomings of the Web client with a ditributed company. With Citrix, you were sending just the presentation layer (the screen) down the WAN pipes. The big juicy PDFs traveled from your batch server to a citrix server over a lan. The screen images of the PDF were then sent over the WAN pipes. With a transition over to the web, using a local web browser, now you are transfering the PDF from the batch server, through the WAN pipes, to the local workstation. So unless you want to spend money on bigger pipes, your other option is to have the citrix servers host the web client, at least for the remote users.

- Gregg
 
Hi,

Au contraire...

Citrix (or Windows Terminal Services) is the way to go
for your JDE Web clients.

JDE Web takes 10x-25x less bandwidth on Citrix than
connecting directly from user PC to the JAS server.

And it's a centralized environment; so you can choose
which version of IE to install, which patches, what
IE settings modify, no crappy plugins/malware/spyware
around, no user fingers poking on Control Panel.

As a bonus, you get an efficient Load Balancing strategy.
Don't avoid Citrix or WTS, go for it!
 
Obviously, for bandwidth-constrained, high latent WAN connections, Citrix is ideal.

Alternatively, you might want to look at Caching and Compression packet forming products - just before I left JDE, Boostworks and Boostedge were products that were being tested, and showed dramatic performance differences based on compressing JDENet packets - especially since the PDF's are just large ASCII files in effect. I believe ActivNetworks purchased this product.

Other products include Riverbed - www.riverbed.com, Silver Peak - www.silver-peak.com and Accelenet - www.accelenet.com

Any of these providers should be able to provide demonstration devices so that you can evaluate the performance increase (if any).

One side line. If you are using SSL, then there is a chance that compression technology might not be able to provide much of a performance benefit unless the packet compression technology can work directly with your SSL service. However, this can then increase latency - in effect, SSL is known to cause performance issues in certain situations, and it might be worth evaluating your connectivity without SSL on internal networks.

Heres the thing though. If you are spending money on packet compression technologies, spending time on trying to overcome issues with SSL and doing all of this without much JDE support, maybe its time to look at Citrix as a solution.

publishing the web browser through citrix is becoming more and more the accepted method, since it ALSO provides central manageability of the web browser. A lot of these benefits outweigh the cost of citrix - so it might be a good idea to stop avoiding the inavoidable !
 
[ QUOTE ]
publishing the web browser through citrix is becoming more and more the accepted method, since it ALSO provides central manageability of the web browser. A lot of these benefits outweigh the cost of citrix - so it might be a good idea to stop avoiding the inavoidable !

[/ QUOTE ]

Especially since you already own it for XE. It's just maintenance that you have to worry about.
 
Wow! You got a lot of responses on this one ;-)

I just mention two other alternatives:
- Our AUTOPRINT solution can send PDF's to the users by e-mail - it will not be real-time, but will offload this task off the current JDE session (and possibly use a different pipe entirely);
- Our Total Rapport solution will open the PDF in the background and so perceptually there will be no waiting specifically for the PDF and it will feel overall faster. This will probably not work from behind a firewall, though. Only if your WAN is over a VPN and the remote users are effectively all in the same network.
 
[ QUOTE ]
We are currently in the planning, build, retrofit and unit test stages of an upgrade project from XE upd 5 to E19.0/T8.98. Our operation is centralized and runs 70 locations (3000+ users, 1000 max) globally and we are having concerns rolling 9.0 out with a web client. Though we still have some further tuning to do, our interactive performance doesn't seem too bad however the viewing of "larger" PDFs from UBEs is somewhat horrendous.
Anybody got any good ideas, experience or alternative approaches as to how to handle / improve this. We are trying to avoid going down the citrix path, however understand this may be our fallback position. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't recall what term Adobe uses, but there is a way to publish PDF's so that they "stream" over a connection, loading the PDF file as it becomes available. I wonder why E1 does not publish using this method?
 
Hi There,

We had the similar problem and after much evaluation we decided to use Citrix client and use IE published via Citirx.

We use multiple software and h/w compression tool and even tried to cap the bandwidth utilization based on the traffic.

We found the better approach is publish IE or any other browser of your choice via CITRIX.
 
[ QUOTE ]
I don't recall what term Adobe uses, but there is a way to publish PDF's so that they "stream" over a connection, loading the PDF file as it becomes available. I wonder why E1 does not publish using this method?

[/ QUOTE ]

I believe Oracle has "page at a time" support built into JAS, but I haven't performed any extensive testing on it and it has been a while since I've seen it mentioned anywhere.
 
I have performed testing of Accelenet, about a year and a half ago, and I can say that for general network access, including CIFS (Windows file share) traffic, the results were very promising for mobile users. This was especially the case through VPN connections on top of air card connections, but also in a branch office with only a T1.

The downside to Accelenet was that it required a software component to be installed on each client and on a centralized server, it was not an appliance at the time I tested it. Gartner gave Accelenet very favorable reviews.

I would have loved an opportunity to test a Riverbed appliance. Packeteer had a WAN accelerator appliance (tech acquired from Tacit Networks and built on Windows), but they were bought out by Bluecoat, who subsequently dumped the Packeteer solution.
 
Back
Top