Slow response from Content Selectors

Question

We are running Weblogic 8.1 (sp4) and the associated Workshop IDE.
In Workshop we built base content selectors which when run pull back a large pool of content (this was done as we don't seem to have the ability in Workshop to build a empty content selector). These content selectors are deployed, with the application, to the application server. The plan was when the application is run the user will be able to add query parameters to the base content selector by choosing items from drop down lists.
During run time, in the application, the user can choose from multiple drop down lists to refine their search for content stored in the CMS. The code in the struts action classes takes these choices and builds queries. When the flow goes back into the JSP, the queries are appended to the base content selector using the tag parameter "appendQuery".
We have found if one search criteria is chosen ,the resulting list comes back in seconds. The user can then choose an item from the list and have the document displayed in the page, again within seconds. To restate the flow: user selects one search criteria, the result takes say 10 seconds to get the document list, the user selects from the lists a specific document and it takes say an additional ten seconds to get the document rendered in the page. In the resulting list, the document title is a link which goes back to a content selector to retrieve the document. The content selector for the link is different than the content selector used to retrieve the list of documents.
The problem case:
Now if the user selects a value from each of the drop downs, to get to an exact document, the resulting search takes approximately two minutes. The result is always displaying a single document, there is no list in this case. We need to reduce the time needed to retrieve the document to an acceptable amount.
Some of the debugging we have done up to this point shows that a large amount of time is spent in the JSP going into the content selector to find the document.
Is there a known issue with using the "appendQuery" parameter in a content selector for multiple additional parameters?
Should we be building our content selector queries differently?
Is there something we need to do in the database to speed up the results?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Robert

Answer 1

In looking at this a little further, if we try to build a content selector in Workshop which uses all of the properties a user could choose. So basically we are hard coding in what could be a users choices. We are seeing a delay in the content coming back to the Content Preview window in Workshop.
When building queries is there some known limit to the number of type Property values which can be used before there is a performance issue in getting the content returned by the content selector?
Thanks