Performance Question - BodyPageUsage versus Text Resources

[gandalf98]

Hi everyone,

Looking for some help from the group here. We have been using a template that decides which pages to enable based on a single data field (letterType). This particular customer added a large number of options to the available letterTypes. We've gone from 8 choices to 60. In order to keep the template manageable, we created a more generic template that swaps out header/footer art and utilizes Text Resources to flow the letter into the template page and then uses overflow to create the appropriate pages.

While this is extremely effective for managing the layout, it is crushing performance. We regularly receive small numbers daily (around 2,000-5,000 records across the 60 options). FusionPro Creator has been knocking these out of the park. However, a few times a year we receive anywhere from 300,000 to 800,000 records as we did this past Monday. The new template (text resources) was averaging around 1,000 records per hour while the old template (page selection) was consistently reaching almost 26,000 per hour.

Any ideas?

[Dan Korn]

It's very hard to offer specific advice about template optimization in the abstract.  I'm imagining that there's some repetitive code or content in the various letter type options that you can reduce down, so that you don't have to use variable pages or text resources (or at least not as many of them), but I would have to see the template, or at least get more details, to make more specific suggestions.

You might also consider upgrading to FusionPro VDP Producer (or Server) if you're regularly getting jobs that big.  Creator is not really meant for such high-volume jobs.  Producer will be able to compose the jobs more quickly, and in parallel with other jobs, without tying up your Creator machine.

[gandalf98]

Thank you for the reply Dan. Soooo sorry - wrong forum. We are using Producer and, yes, i've been pushing hard to make the investment in server (to fully automate our "automation"). I would love to send the templates for your review, but the process PHI. I will locate some test data and upload the templates later today.

[ThomasLewis]

Not sure if this will help at all since it sounds like you are dealing with mostly text, but there is an optimization setting in the Output tab that allows for Advanced or Basic compression. Advanced significantly slows things down for me. I had one particularly heavy image job that composed in about 20 minutes using Basic, I did a test with Advanced and it took just over 2 and half days to complete. It seems the default setting is Advanced for some reason, I would recommend changing this over to Basic for most things, as it is significantly faster and Advanced only gives minimal file size savings.

[Dan Korn]

6 minutes ago, ThomasLewis said:

Not sure if this will help at all since it sounds like you are dealing with mostly text, but there is an optimization setting in the Output tab that allows for Advanced or Basic compression. Advanced significantly slows things down for me. I had one particularly heavy image job that composed in about 20 minutes using Basic, I did a test with Advanced and it took just over 2 and half days to complete. It seems the default setting is Advanced for some reason, I would recommend changing this over to Basic for most things, as it is significantly faster and Advanced only gives minimal file size savings.

That's a good point.  Compression is an optimization, and like all optimizations, it's a tradeoff, in this case between composition time and output file size.  And of course, how each side of that tradeoff works is highly dependent upon the job and what features and inputs it uses.  We have seen it make a big difference in file size in some jobs, as much as a 90 percent reduction, without any significant increase in composition time, but again, it depends on the job.  That's why it's an option.

Another thing you might consider is chunking the output to multiple files.  A job with a lot of records and pages will get to the end of the composition and can take a while just to output the pages to a PDF file and write that file to disk.  Chunking can alleviate this quite a bit.

[gandalf98]

Thank you for the suggestions. I believe that our issue was related to the use of a Producer Queue that was connected to a UNC share. The letterTypes in this particular instance were only picking up a few pieces of header/footer art but it feels like it was enough network round-robin to slow it down. I've since tested each template type (Page Selection vs. Text Resources) and having your resources local to the server is the way to go for us (at least on the monthly large runs!).

Thanks again!
Guy