About the Performance tool

Using this data, you can assess possible sources of improved performance (faster response time or higher throughput) through software changes, hardware changes, or rule changes.

As PRPC operates, it collects statistics about the demands made on processing resources, and the server system's response. The Performance tool summarizes and formats these statistics and presents them as HTML pages.

Performance data shows the processing demand statistics of your work since you connected, and may help you assess the performance impact of various approaches or configuration choices.

The DB Trace facility logs all SQL interactions between your PRPC session and the PegaRULES database.

Performance statistics can help you distinguish between performance issues that arise in the PRPC server, the PegaRULES database, or external systems called by the workflow. In all cases, the statistics can help you determine how to improve performance.

To view performance data:

1. Select > Performance or > System > Performance, or the equivalent keyboard shortcut CTRL + Q.
2. The Performance panel appears, containing statistics that reflect totals since you logged on.
3. You can interact with the summary tool page to record statistics. See Performance tool — Using the Summary display.

Through a personal preference, you can control whether the Performance tool opens in a new window or in the lower half of the Developer workspace.

1. Select Preferences from the Designer Studio Profile menu.
2. Access the Tools group of preferences. Select the Performance checkbox to cause the tool to open in a new window. Clear the checkbox to cause the tool to open within the workspace.
3. Click  Save  .

Click the INIT, FULL, or DELTA links to access the Full Details display for that row. This display provides additional statistics from the same snapshot.

See Performance tool — Full Details Display.

The pxProcessCPU property records CPU time in seconds for the Java process since startup of the node, covering all requestors combined. The pxTotalReqCPU property records total CPU time of this JVM responding to HTTP requests and to service requests. These two statistics are available, by default, on all platforms.

For Windows, more detailed CPU statistics and elapsed time statistics are available by default.

You can disable or reduce the potential overhead of CPU statistics gathering through a prconfig.xml setting:

<env name='initialization/CpuTimerLevel' value = "ZZZZZ" />

where ZZZZZ is one of the following values:

• FULL — Extensive detail (and highest overhead)
• TOTALSONLY — Only the two summary statistics pxProcessCPU and pxTotalReqCPU are reported.
• NONE — No CPU statistics are gathered, all CPU statistics are reported as zero.

If this setting is not present in your prconfig.xml file, the default behavior for Windows servers is that the FULL setting is used. For UNIX/Linux servers, the default is TOTALSONLY.

As an alternative to the prconfig.xml file, you can use Dynamic System Settings to configure your application.
See How to create or update a prconfig setting.

Timings are based on JVM software implementations that depend on JVM versions and vendor; this may limit the validity of cross-system comparisons. For example, the IBM JVM does not provide pxProcessCpu. Also, if your system uses Sun Microsystems JVM 1.5, the sun.misc.Perf interface is used. In other JVMs, the System.nanoTime or system.CurrentTimeMillis class may be used.

The Performance tool supports interactive sessions directly. Services operate as background requestors; you can capture selected Performance statistics in a log file. See Performance tool — Statistics for services.

The Performance tool shows detailed results at a moment in time. To see a detailed trace of the internal operations, use the Database Trace gadget.

To start the Database Trace gadget, select > System > Performance > Database Trace.

See System category — Performance page for more information and instructions on this gadget. In releases before V6.2, this gadget was known as the DB Trace tool.

When two instances of PRPC are installed on a single Windows server (for example, one for testing and one for production), performance tool CPU statistics may not be available on the copy started second.