uProduce Performance Question

[ppietras]

We have a need for a client to generate personalized postcards using uProduce.

One of the requirements is that we produce an separate PDF for each recipient. 

We have found that the uProduce extensions server  creates the individual PDFs more slowly than we would like. I know that we can add extension servers to help speed the process, and that's an avenue that we will likely take. 

However, our extension servers are virtual servers in Azure. So, another possible avenue is to change the specs of the virtual server. However, I'm not sure where we'd get the most improvement.

Cany anyone tell me what get the most bang for the buck?

Faster processor?
More RAM?
Faster disks?

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated?

[couch]

Why it is slower: 

1) to create individual PDFs, each element that is needed in the document (eg a logo that is the same for every recipient) has to be embedded into each PDF, but when creating a single PDF for multiple recipients, the logo needs to be added only once, and then referenced in the other locations.
2) XMPie also employs some proprietary tricks when processing large recipient lists. When processing a PDF for each recipient, the system will (if processing an InDesign document rather than XLIM) will use InDesign's built-in PDF export process.

You are right to consider server specs as one method of improving performance, but unfortunatly, I have no experience to help you with recommendations. Since they are virtual servers, perhaps it would be easy to increase one parameter, test, revert it back and increase another parameter, test, etc, and report back your findings for posterity? If you decide to do this, after making your configuration changes and rebooting, I would recommend processing a couple jobs first before recording your test times. This will ensure that the production instances are up and running and you don't get times skewed by having to launch some applications.

Other suggestions:

1) try XLIM document production.

2) try other output formats. Perhaps using PostScript output and an Acrobat Distiller hot folder (or some other utility) may reduce total times. (Personally, I doubt this one, but it is worth testing.)

3) there are other PDF utilities that you may be able to test - eg process the full output in uProduce, and pass the PDF to another tool that splits it off into 1 page (or 2 page if double-sided) files.

4) when performance is an issue, always look at the document design and look at ways to optimize the design for speed.

[west-digital.fr]

It may be fairly easy with the Windows Resource Monitor (or any other tool you like) to check that CPU and RAM are not too high during separate composition.

I rarely or never saw that.

On the opposite, more output files = more I/O. So SSD may really make the difference. Also, I would consider checking if KB#31 was properly applied.

Anyhow, "local" composition ( = to local drives) should be way faster than network composition, even if you think that the target machine is "near".

west-digital.fr