Best Practices Guide for SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.0

I have been a performance architect for five years now and I think maybe it's about time to share some of my experience with you, SAP customers. My hope is that this blog will increase your awareness and add to your knowledge and if, as a result of reading it, you are able to boost performance in your organization - I'll be very happy.

The idea of a portal performance guide came up as part of a project to reduce TCO for our customers. There was a clear need to create some order out of a wide variety of performance recommendations and notes. The idea was to save time for customers, to enable them to find everything in one document. So we created the Performance Best Practices Guide for SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.0, hoping that this is a big step in that direction.

While looking at customer messages about performance, I saw that most of the time is spent trying to identify the source of the problem, causing a long, ping-pong of discussions between customers and our support team. The first part of the document tries to eliminate this ping-pong phase and gives some directions about how to isolate the main suspects in your performance pain.

The second part of the document talks about the navigation cache. This cache can make miracles, but only if you use it wisely, so I recommend reading about it.
The third chapter reveals the portal runtime properties that can influence performance and chapter four talks about Portal Content Directory (PCD). I truly recommend reading this chapter.
Finally, there is a chapter about sizing.
You can find the document from the Best Practices - Portal page on SDN.
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/index?rid=/webcontent/uuid/e0b46f8a-8fce-2b10-95a5-b72dd53a952b

This is a direct link to the guide:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/f0f1358d-0812-2c10-b58c-c7bdd7a0cdce

I worked on the performance guide together with my colleagues, portal developers, and our consultants from the field. I really hope you find it useful. I am also more than willing to receive constructive criticism. So don’t think twice about writing your opinions about the document.