10g Disco Portlets : Scalability across hundreds of users

Hi,
Looking for some insight to scaling disco portlets across hundreds of users. Using Discoverer 10g 10.1.2 and have a portal with about 25 Disco Portlets scattered across a few portal pages. (Using Oracle Portal also) Every user gets the same pages, but the content of Disco portlets is different by user.
Most of the Disco Portlets are Worksheet Portlets showing a table + graph, the remaining disco portlets are Worksheet List portlets. Some portlets refresh hourly, and some are once a day.
We've staggered hourly portlets at different times of the hour so they don't all refresh at say the 00 mark of each hour. Portlet A refreshes at 00 minute mark, Portlet B refreshes at the 10 minute mark, etc.
Because each user needs to see different data, the disco portlets all use private connections vs. public connections, so each portlet graph shows different data depending on the user.
What's happening is at the 00 minute mark, each user is having their Portlet A being refreshed. As the number of users grows, this just gets worse and worse. There seem to be refreshes happening constantly. The kicker is, these hourly refreshes happen regardless of the user looking at the portal that day or not.
We're having challenges with scaling the portal as the number of users is growing. How did Oracle envision Disco Portlets to scale with hundreds/thousands of users? All we can do is stagger the hourly refreshes, but we can't stagger the users.
We have Disco running on one unix server, the database on a 2'nd server, Portal on a 3'rd and Infra on a 4'th.
Any insight into scaling Disco Portlets for the above scenario would be helpful.
Thanks.

Hi,
Let me see if I can start the ball rolling for you on this one with some insight from previous implementations.
"What's happening is at the 00 minute mark, each user is having their Portlet A being refreshed. As the number of users grows, this just gets worse and worse. There seem to be refreshes happening constantly. The kicker is, these hourly refreshes happen regardless of the user looking at the portal that day or not."
1. The portlets will get refreshed once per main portlet and an additional refresh for each customization. This could explain why you are seeing more refreshes than you expected.
2. The refreshes will occur per the schedule to refresh the data in cache whether or not the user is logged in.
The way is works at very high-level is like this:
The PortletProvider is a J2EE application running under OC4J_BI_Forms container.
It polls PTM5_SCHEDULE table every 2 seconds or as specified by peekSleepIntervalSec parameter in the configuration.xml
If a portlet refresh is found (ie the scheduled refresh time arrives) then the information about the refresh is added into a job queue within OC4J_BI_Forms.
Java threads pick up jobs from the queue (parallel processing, maxsessions).
For each job a session is picked up from the session pool, query is generated and sent to EUL/database to retrieve data.
Next, retrieved data is processed into XML and stored in PTM5_CACHE table as BLOB.
The PTM5_SCHEDULE table is updated with Last Refresh Date and Next Refresh Date, etc.
The next time the relevant portlet is accessed in a browser refreshed data are read from PTM5_CACHE (and formatted per customization).
Discoverer Portlet sessions can be pooled, enabling them to be reused by different Discoverer Portlets. Pooling Discoverer Portlet sessions saves CPU and memory resource usage.
You can see how to control these parameters via the Application Server Control or $OH/discoverer/configuration.xml file in the documentation here:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/html/B13918_03/con_files.htm#sthref1195
Now having said that, there have been a few bugs in the Portlet provider regarding how the session pool behaves and one that does not kill existing dis51ws processes.(bug 4929480)
I also seem to recall from past a bug about hourly refreshes specifically.
(bug 4929480) is documented in
Note 436135.1 Discoverer 10g (10.1.2) Sessions (dis51ws) Are Not Terminated After Timeout Causing Users Unable To Login
Oracle has produced some patches, but which one you apply really depends upon your version, environment (ie. EBS11i/SSO integrated or not), current patches applied and your platform.
You may have to work that out with Oracle Support, but I can tell you in general some good one-off merge patches that you should apply (based on my experiences).
From the note above:
For versions 10.1.2.1 / 10.1.2.0.2 (Discoverer 10.1.2.48.18 and 10.1.2.50.05):
Patch 5922220 is the latest known Portlet merge patch on top of 10.1.2.1 (10.1.2.50.05) for E-Business Suite Single Sign-On integrated customers and Patch 5497101 is the latest known Portlet merge patch on top of 10.1.2.1 (10.1.2.48.18) for other customers. Both of these patches include the above fix.
# For versions 10.1.2.2 (Discoverer 10.1.2.54.25):
* We recommend you apply Discoverer "cumulative patch II" ( Patch 6129303 ) as directed by Oracle Support if it is appropriate for your environment.
I would consider:
A.) Make sure you are patched appropriately
B.) Make sure you have tuned your Discoverer portlet session pool.
C.) If the load is large enough, you may need to consider an additional Discoverer standalone server with a load balancer.
A note on that: Load balancing portlets is a bit different than standard HTTP applications (Plus/Viewer) since each portlet application on each server will be checking the refresh table in the metadata repository (infrastructure) database.
You will have to ensure:
a.) the times on each server is synchronized
b.) the the peeksleepinterval is adjusted on each server to accommodate a smaller server vs. larger server (ie. which one you want to pick up more of the refreshes)
Oracle Support has documented those pretty well in MetaLink document 360310.1 How Discoverer Portlet Provider Refreshes Are Distributed In A Load Balanced Environment
I hope that helps get you started.
Other comments / experiences welcomed.
Regards,
Steve.

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