Network Bandwidth

One of the primary causes of performance bottlenecks in AgilePoint systems is insufficient network bandwidth and/or performance. Determining whether your network bandwidth is sufficient depends greatly upon the system's usage patterns and data metrics. In fact, depending on an AgilePoint system's usage patterns and data metrics, improving network bandwidth and performance can sometimes improve performance more than using faster hardware. For example, for system's that handle large amounts of data (in either quantity and/or size), the bandwidth and throughput between the workflow server and the workflow database server can be critical to achieving optimal performance. Similarly, for AgilePoint systems that are integrated with SharePoint, the bandwidth and throughput between the workflow server and the SharePoint server (and also between the SharePoint server and the SharePoint server's database server) is often very important.

However, increasing network bandwidth for improving network performance is sometimes not an option, because network throughput is usually a factor of the network's infrastructure. Therefore, when network issues are causing significant performance issues, it is sometimes effective to combine dedicated servers into a single non-dedicated server. Merging dedicated servers into one completely eliminates any network performance issues resulting from the traffic between the merged servers, since all such traffic now remains entirely on the merged server. However, merging dedicated servers may also cause you to lose the advantages that having dedicated servers provided (see below), so this option should be considered very carefully before being taken.

Another possible improvement is to physically relocate some or all of the system's servers, as this may also improve network throughput between the servers without requiring major infrastructure changes.