RedDot CMS RQL Performance

Whilst recently surfing across the Interwebs, I came across this great line – ‘Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, optimal application performance is in the experience of the end user’. So true. It doesn’t matter how fantastic your application (or CMS project in this case) might be in terms of features and wiz bang widgets and plugins, all of your users are going to think that it bites the big one if your project runs like a dog.

I am aware of the do’s and don’ts in regards to RedDot CMS performance, however I have had the luxury over the past year or so to build and manage RedDot CMS / Open Text Web Site Management projects on some super spec’ed servers. It’s difficult to notice any significant performance hits when pages are served up straight away, regardless of what methods you use to build up your project and how many pages are connected. Rule of thumb: always stick to best practises and you’ll be OK, however it’s not always easy getting hold of these best practises at the best of times..

I have been working on a number of CMS enhancements on the Solution Exchange site with Danny Baggs recently, which also includes the integration of my toolbar plugin in SmartEdit mode (which will be available for download shortly!). Although the majority of the plugin makes use of ‘info’ placeholders to obtain page information, I needed to run some RQL queries to order obtain user account details. These queries were being run using pre-executing code inside the CMS templates.

Given that there are a couple of unique performance challenges with the SolEx site that are currently being rectified (in particular the direct integration of the CMS component into the site), any gains to be made on the CMS project front shouldn’t be overlooked. Shout outs to Jian Huang (Senior Consultant @ Open Text) who recommended we run all RQL queries via AJAX calls to speed up performance of the page. I’m glad to report that page load times have dropped significantly when creating and editing solution and profile pages!
There’s now plenty of information up online on how to run RQL via AJAX – so I won’t go into too much detail here on how it’s done, although I will say that it is fairly straight forward.

It’s also worth pointing out that RQL commands (if possible) should be executed against the COM objects rather than the web services, as Jian indicates it “competes with Management Server for RQL communication bandwidth.” (Manuel Schnitger and Dennis Reil have recently indicated that this will be replaced with WCF in the near future.)

I would also recommend you check out Oshyn’s whitepaper ‘RedDot CMS: Improving Installation Performance‘ for other RedDot CMS performance hints and tips.

I would very much be interested to hear from anyone who has metrics around performance gains/hits regarding various RedDot CMS features such as RQL COM vs Web Services, Render tags and PreExecute code.