Deployment

General Recommendations

• Consider using an external metadata repository in production. There is no advantages of using the embedded metadata repository besides simplifying installation: as you don’t have to configure an external metadata repository. There are a number of disadvantages:
  • Performance and throughput: The embedded metadata repository is based on H2 database which is less powerful than standalone database systems such as SQL Server and PostgreSQL. So you can expect significant performance improvements especially under heavy load.
  • Easy to monitor and manage: more third-party tools support SQL Server and PostgreSQL so it will be easier for you to connect to the metadata repository for implementing monitoring, reporting, and management tasks. Performance improvements are relevant for metadata queries as well, for example, if you need to build a customer report based on Activity Log, which can be quite long.
• System Logging. Remember that InfoLink logs to the Tomcat log only during startup until its own logging subsystem is initialized. The rest of the system logs is going into its own log files that can be viewed via UI (click on the System Log tab on the home page) or can be found in <infolink home directory>/logs.
• Setting connectionPoolMaxTotal and jobThreadsMax in the configuration file. connectionPoolMaxTotal defines the maximum number of connections to the metadata repository. jobThreadsMax is the maximum number of jobs that can be executed at the same time. Minimum value for connectionPoolMaxTotal must be 4 (make it 10 to be save) plus 1 for each jobThreadsMax (because usually InfoLink does not need more than one connection during scenario execution to get scenario/source/specification needed for the execution). So if you expect to process 100 jobs in parallel you need only 110 connections.

Recommendations for using InfoLink with Enterworks

• Location of the installation folder. InfoLink can be installed in any folder, which is defined by the INFOLINK_HOME environment variable, but when used with Enterworks it is usually installed in Fusion or MatchService subfolder (depending on your intended usage) of Enterworks folder: that is where people usually try to find it.
• Sharing Tomcat instance with Enterworks. Typically InfoLink is deployed (as server.war) to the same Tomcat instance with Enterworks. There is nothing wrong in deploying them together and the majority of our users successfully do it. Nevertheless, deploying InfoLink to a separate Tomcat instance (usually on another machine) can give you some advantages:
  • It is easier to restart InfoLink (by restarting Tomcat) without restarting the whole Enterworks (because restarting Tomcat without restarting the whole Enterworks is not recommended). Note that it is still possible to restart only InfoLink even when it is deployed at the same Tomcat with Enterworks by using Tomcat application reload function. But restarting Tomcat is easier than restarting a single application.
  • Deploying InfoLink to a separate Tomcat instance can increase throughput when you run many concurrent InfoLink jobs because InfoLink will not share resources with Enterworks.