About
Oriental Trading Company is one of the nation's leading direct marketers of popular party supplies, toys, giftware and home accents.
Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, Oriental Trading Company has been a successful international business for more than 65 years. They are a strong, growing and fun company with high-quality products and a staunch commitment to excellent customer service.
Environment
They are implementing an e-commerce strategy with IBM's Websphere Commerce Suite 4.1 (WCS) and a data warehouse with Silvon Data Tracker.
AS/400 Stats Model 720 2164, Version 4.4 OS/400, 128GB DASD, 3 GB memory.
Issue
Oriental had documented increased CPU usage in their web server since going live with Websphere Commerce Suite (WCS). IBM was evaluating their WCS configuration to make sure the configuration was optimal. As part of that evaluation, IBM had requested Oriental's WCS developers to send them copy of performance data collected to identify hotspots. In parallel, Oriental's Systems Management group had been evaluating the data with insure/INDEX and insure/ANALYSIS modules. When the developers received recommendations from IBM to create several logical files and identified some SQL scripts within WCS they were going to evaluate, they matched the indexes and SQL statements referenced by insure/INDEX and insure/ANALYSIS modules.
Results
|
July 11 |
July 17 |
Aug. 18 |
Aug. 24 |
| Site 1 |
1.25 |
1.14 |
9.73 |
.089 |
| Site 2 |
1.03 |
1.06 |
0.27 |
0.33 |
| Site 3 |
0.88 |
0.89 |
0.9 |
0.88 |
| Site 4 |
1.22 |
0.65 |
1.03 |
0.84 |
Websphere Commerce Suite (WCS) versions of Site 1 and Site 2 were in production after Aug 16. Insure/INDEX recommended indexes were created on 8/24 for Site 1 only. Based on the results of Site 1, the indexes will be created for the other sites to ensure continued optimal performance on WCS.
Analysis
Using the Centerfield toolset, it took a few minutes to analyze and fix problems. Using traditional methods, it usually takes a day or longer.
Summary
"Our development team was astounded I could give them that type of performance information as they thought only IBM could analyze the data and provide the resulting recommendations. The > 900% improvement in Site 1 HTTP Server is fantastic. This definitely validated the purchase of the Centerfield toolset and now we have the proof of the power of these tools. This is a toolset we will continue to use to evaluate our production and development systems. It sure has made an impact," says Bob Cargill, Systems Engineering Manager
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