In addition to the traditional requirements of the Pro/INTRALINK application and Oracle, the Apache web server and Tomcat servlet engine may require a significant percentage of available system memory. These new components and not just minor additions to Pro/INTRALINK, they are a fundamental part of it’s web architecture!

Accordingly, they must be allocated sufficient memory to run properly and be balanced in the proper percentages. One of the most often overlooked requirements is configuring enough memory for the Tomcat servlet engine. In fact, Tomcat requires as much memory to run properly as Oracle and Pro/INTRALINK!

If you use a monolithic installation (everything on one machine), it is important to balance the available memory across all of the components to minimize disk paging and to prevent starving any processes of memory.

If we take a look at a hypothetical system with 1GB of RAM, we would typically allocate about 25% (or 256MB) of available system memory to Pro/INTRALINK, 25% to Oracle, 25% to Tomcat, 6% (or 64MB) to the web server, and the remainder going to the operating system. As you add more memory to your server, you can start with similar percentages.

The default startup files for Tomcat typically have the heap size set very conservatively. Take a look at the wttomcat_startup.bat file in the Tomcat <loadpoint>\bin directory. The line for JAVA_OPTS is usually set to –Xms64M –Xmx128m. In a system with 1GB with memory, the starting point for -Xmx should be closer to 256M and –Xms should be around 50% of –Xmx or 128M. One thing to watch out for is if you have configured Tomcat to start as a service but did not specify any heap size parameters as startup options. The default value for –Xmx is probably even lower and you are almost guaranteed to have slow performance and memory errors.

There are many variables involved in tuning an application for optimum performance, but these percentages should be a good starting point for your Intralink 8.0 server.

Please continue to provde us your feedback and questions to the PTC Pro/INTRALINK Forums http://www.ptc.com/go/forums.

Wally McGuire

Sr Windchill Specialist