Poor performance of ReportingService web API ListChildren() method

Question

Hi,
I am facing slowness issues when fetching files and folder list from report server. See fiddler report below. There is around 1000 files and folder on server and it is taking around 5 sec. I tried some of solution as shown below , but no luck.
I am calling public CatalogItem[] ListChildren(string ItemPath, bool Recursive) method to get list of item from server.
https://abc.com/ReportManager_Perf/Pages/Folder.aspx?ItemPath=%2f&ViewMode=List
ACTUAL PERFORMANCE
ClientConnected:     09:39:39.278
ClientBeginRequest:  09:39:42.340
GotRequestHeaders:   09:39:42.340
ClientDoneRequest:   09:39:42.340
Determine Gateway:   0ms
DNS Lookup:          0ms
TCP/IP Connect:      0ms
HTTPS Handshake:     0ms
ServerConnected:     09:39:39.627
FiddlerBeginRequest: 09:39:42.346
ServerGotRequest:    09:39:42.346
ServerBeginResponse: 09:39:46.547
GotResponseHeaders:  09:39:46.547
ServerDoneResponse:  09:39:47.554
ClientBeginResponse: 09:39:47.554
ClientDoneResponse:  09:39:47.556
Overall Elapsed:  0:00:05.216
https://..../ReportManager_Perf/Pages/Folder.aspx?ItemPath=%2fPegasus%2fReports&ViewMode=List
ACTUAL PERFORMANCE
ClientConnected:     09:39:47.651
ClientBeginRequest:  09:40:02.313
GotRequestHeaders:   09:40:02.313
ClientDoneRequest:   09:40:02.314
Determine Gateway:   0ms
DNS Lookup:          0ms
TCP/IP Connect:      0ms
HTTPS Handshake:     0ms
ServerConnected:     09:39:47.978
FiddlerBeginRequest: 09:40:02.315
ServerGotRequest:    09:40:02.315
ServerBeginResponse: 09:40:06.399
GotResponseHeaders:  09:40:06.399
ServerDoneResponse:  09:40:07.272
ClientBeginResponse: 09:40:07.273
ClientDoneResponse:  09:40:07.274
Overall Elapsed:  0:00:04.960
https://.../ReportManager_Perf/Pages/Folder.aspx?ItemPath=%2fPegasus%2fReports%2fTo+Be+Published&ViewMode=List
ACTUAL PERFORMANCE
ClientConnected:     09:39:47.651
ClientBeginRequest:  09:40:15.896
GotRequestHeaders:   09:40:15.896
ClientDoneRequest:   09:40:15.896
Determine Gateway:   0ms
DNS Lookup:          0ms
TCP/IP Connect:      0ms
HTTPS Handshake:     0ms
ServerConnected:     09:39:47.978
FiddlerBeginRequest: 09:40:15.896
ServerGotRequest:    09:40:15.896
ServerBeginResponse: 09:40:20.378
GotResponseHeaders:  09:40:20.378
ServerDoneResponse:  09:40:23.267
ClientBeginResponse: 09:40:23.281
ClientDoneResponse:  09:40:23.289
Overall Elapsed:  0:00:07.392
I tried to find some work around
Reference:
http://blog.stevienova.com/2009/01/27/sql-server-2005-reporting-services-fix-slow-loading-on-first-report-load/  - This is
also working for SQL Server 2008
Design Consideration while calling the Web Service
Consider buffering. By default, the BufferResponse configuration
setting is set to true, to ensure that the response is completely buffered before returning to the client. This default setting is good for small amounts of data. For large amounts of data, consider disabling buffering, as shown in the
following code snippet.
[WebMethod(BufferResponse=false)]
public string GetTextFile() {
  // return large amount of data
To determine whether or not to enable or disable buffering for your application, measure performance with and without buffering.
Consider caching responses. For applications that deal
with relatively static data, consider caching the responses to avoid accessing the database for every client request. You can use the CacheDuration attribute to specify the number of seconds the response should be cached in server
memory, as shown in the following code snippet.
[WebMethod(CacheDuration=60)]
public string GetSomeDetails() {
  // return large amount of data
Note that because caching consumes server memory, it might not be appropriate if your Web method returns large amounts of data or data that frequently changes
Enable session state only for Web methods that need it.
Session state is disabled by default. If your Web service needs to maintain state, then you can set theEnableSession attribute to true for a specific Web method, as shown in the following code snippet.
[WebMethod(EnableSession=true)]
public string GetSomeDetails() {
  // return large amount of data
Note that clients must also maintain an HTTP cookie to identify the state between successive calls to the Web method.

Answer 1

I have been able to improve processing speed up to
6-8 times with these two techniques:
1. A separate trickle thread was created that would
periodically call DbEnv::memp_trickle. This works
especially good on multicore machines, but also
speeds things up a bit on single CPU boxes. This
alone improved speed from 2K rec/sec to about 4K
rec/sec.Hello Stone,
I am facing a similar problem, and I too hope to resolve the same with memp_trickle. I had these queries.
1. what was the % of clean pages that you specified?
2. What duration were you clling this thread to call memp_trickle?
This would give me a rough idea about which to tune my app. Would really appreciate if you can answer these queries.
Regards,
Nishith.
>
2. Maintaining multiple secondary databases in real
time proved to be the bottleneck. The code was
changed to create secondary databases at the end of
the run (calling Db::associate with the DB_CREATE
flag), right before the reports are generated, which
use these secondary databases. This improved speed
from 4K rec/sec to 14K rec/sec.