Planning Server Performance and Scalability

PerformancePoint Planning performance and scalability are dictated by the environment in which it is deployed. Network performance, usage patterns and profiles, architecture, and hardware all affect how Planning Server performs.

A scalable deployment topology allows the system to grow as the performance demand increases. In a design-time environment, a stand-alone configuration may provide adequate performance. However, in a test or production environment, the five-computer or eight-computer topologies discussed in the previous section will allow the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 system to be scaled up and scaled out. The PerformancePoint Server system can be scaled up by increasing the system resources on the PerformancePoint Server servers — such as adding additional processors, memory, and disks. This PerformancePoint Server system can be scaled out by deploying front-end Web server computers in one or more clusters to meet the increasing demand from business users.

Generally the performance of the Planning deployment is determined by the server that has the lowest performance — the bottleneck in the system. The key to improving performance is to identify the bottlenecks within the system and address them with hardware changes or software configurations.

PerformancePoint Server system provides limited configurations at the server level to optimize performance configurations with regard to connection timeouts, compression, encryption, and logging configurations. For more information, see PerformancePoint Server Operations Guide, "Editing the PerformancePoint Configuration File".. In addition to these settings, Planning Server also provides performance counters to monitor and identify and fine tune the performance of a production system.

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