15 Performance Improvements for Oracle BI Publisher

Oracle BI Publisher 10.1.3.3 has added performance improvements to its already fast Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) and Bursting engine. If you are running BI Publisher on a multiprocessor machine or on multicore processors, you can take better advantage of your hardware.

To enable these performance improvements, go to the Runtime Configuration page on either the Admin page or by following the Configure link for a specific report.

15.1 Multithreading for Bursting

If you have a multiprocessor machine or even a machine with a dual core single processor, you may be able to achieve even higher bursting throughput using the new multithreading functionality for Bursting.

Under the Bursting section on the Runtime Configuration page, you will see two properties that need to be set. Set "Enable multithreading" to True and set "Thread count" to some number greater than 1 and up to the number of processors or cores present on the machine.

If the report delivery channel is File System there will not be any considerable performance gain using multithreading. For delivery destinations other then File delivery, you should notice the performance gain.

Due to other processes that might be running on your system you may need to empirically determine what is the optimal setting for "Thread count." Try a series of tests by varying the setting "Thread count" to see what is optimal for your environment.

Note: Leave these settings at the default if your system does not have multicore processors or more than one processor. Setting "Enable multithreading" to True and "Thread count" to some number greater than the number of cores on the machine will lead to higher CPU usage without any gain in performance.

15.2 Multithreading for Document Generation

If you have a multiprocessor machine or even a machine with a dual core single processor, you may be able to achieve even faster document generation using the new multithreading functionality for FO Processing.

Under the FO Processor section of the properties, set "Enable multithreading" to True.

The amount of performance gain seen by enabling this setting will depend on how much the current system resources are utilized.

On a system that has numerous users running and relatively high CPU utilizations, you will likely only see minor improvements after setting "Enable multithreading" to True.

If the system is used by only a few users, or reports are scheduled sequentially one at a time, or the number of CPUs is more than the number of concurrent reports, then turning on multiple threads will speed up report generation.

Note: Memory utilization is likely to increase once "Enable multithreading" is set to True.

These properties can be set at the server and report level. See "Setting Runtime Properties" in the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide for more information on setting properties.

Note: If you are running BI Publisher on a single-core, one processor machine, leave these multithreading configuration settings at the default value of False.