Home
Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Performance
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
HCL Cache
The HCL Cache integrates with DynaCache and improves performance and scalability with features such as remote caching, real-time monitoring, and auto-tuning capabilities.
Caching and Redis client configurations for HCL Cache
The HCL Cache is configured via a set of files that define the configurations for each cache, and the Redis connection information.
HCL Cache configurations
The HCL Cache provides a set of configuration files in YAML format. The configuration can be updated for tuning purposes, or to provide custom caches with non-default configurations. See Configurations in Helm for details on how the configuration is updated.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
  - Methodology
    Like site security, a proper approach to site performance requires planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. The following collections of topics describe each phase of this process, and contain the recommended considerations, and best practices for getting the most out of your HCL Commerce deployment.
  - Setting cache providers
    Starting with HCL Commerce Version 9.1, all caches are automatically configured to use the HCL Cache. However, the cache provider for each cache can be set to use the DynaCache provider, or the WebSphere Extreme Scale DynaCache provider.
  - HCL Cache
    The HCL Cache integrates with DynaCache and improves performance and scalability with features such as remote caching, real-time monitoring, and auto-tuning capabilities.
    - HCL Cache Architecture
      In previous releases of HCL Commerce, DynaCache in-memory caching was used for caching. In HCL Commerce 9.1, hclcache extends the functionality of DynaCache and brings important improvements.
    - Monitoring HCL Cache
      HCL Cache integrates with the Prometheus and Grafana monitoring framework. The use of this integration is critical for tuning, and to ensure the correct function of the cache.
    - Redis servers for HCL Cache
    - Caching and Redis client configurations for HCL Cache
      The HCL Cache is configured via a set of files that define the configurations for each cache, and the Redis connection information.
      - HCL Commerce - Redis client configurations
        HCL Commerce uses the Redisson client to communicate with the Redis server. Redisson is configured using a YAML configuration file, which is defined in the HCL Commerce Helm chart and stored in a Kubernetes configuration map.
      - HCL Cache configurations
        The HCL Cache provides a set of configuration files in YAML format. The configuration can be updated for tuning purposes, or to provide custom caches with non-default configurations. See Configurations in Helm for details on how the configuration is updated.
        Default configuration
        The HCL Cache cache_cfg.yaml configuration file contains default cache configurations.
        Custom configuration
        Settings in the custom configuration file, which shares the same format as the default configuration file, override settings in the default configuration file.
    - Custom caching
      HCL Cache extends the capabilities of DynaCache and introduces remote caching. Therefore, additional configuration options are available for custom caches. Custom caches can be configured using the Cache Configuration Yaml file for extensions.
    - HCL Cache Manager
      The HCL Cache Manager provides a set of REST interfaces to interact with the cache, additional monitoring metrics, and a set of utilities.
    - Troubleshooting the HCL Cache
      Tools and techniques that can be used for troubleshooting the cache.
    - Change Log
  - Experiments considerations
    When experiments that you have created in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator are running in the store, the Scheduler launches a job that determines whether any of the current experiments have expired. The job compares the expiration date specified in the experiment to the current system date. When an experiment is identified as expired, its status is updated in the database, and the experiment is prevented from displaying to customers.
  - Website performance tuning
    There are four steps for evaluating performance of an HCL Commerce website that is based on Transaction server.
  - Tuning the price rule object cache
    You can improve performance by changing the size of the cache used to store price rule business objects during storefront runtime.
  - Data Load utility performance tuning
    Scheduled Data Load utility jobs can affect HCL Commerce performance. You can reduce the impact of this process by tuning the data load performance appropriately for your implementation.
  - Workspaces performance tuning
    Workspaces use database views instead of tables to retrieve data. Retrieval of underlying data might be more time-consuming because of the complexity of SQL statements that are used in workspace view definitions.
  - Configuring custom DynaCache objects in WebSphere Liberty
    The WebSphere Liberty profile, can be configured with distributed map for the custom cache objects. To configure the custom cache objects for WebSphere Liberty in Runtime and Development, follow the steps outlined below:
  - Configuring custom DynaCache objects in HCL Commerce
    Define the custom cache in WebSphere Application Server. You can then use the cache name to store and retrieve the cache objects.
  - Preparing HCL Commerce for the peak shopping periods
    When preparing for peak shopping periods, such as the holiday season, use the following best practices to effectively manage your HCL Commerce environment for peak efficiency, and to ensure that your HCL Commerce site is ready to handle the increased load.
  - OneTest Performance sample script for Emerald B2C Store
    HCL OneTest provides software testing tools to support a DevOps approach: API testing, functional testing, UI testing, performance testing and service virtualization. This approach aids in test automation, for earlier and more frequent discovery of errors.
  - Docker performance tuning
    The following performance tuning information can be used to help you configure your containerized HCL Commerce environments for optimal performance.
  - Thread Monitor - Yaml configuration file
    The Thead Monitor tool gathers thread dumps and Javacores at a configured interval, and during events such as high WebContainer/Default_Executor pool thread usage. Yaml configuration file must exist with name /SETUP/support/thread_monitor.yaml, or under the location specified with the THREAD_MONITOR_CFG environment variable.
  - Search health check
    The search health check API is used to regularly check the status of Commerce containers to make sure they are in a healthy state.
  - Elasticsearch performance tuning
    You have numerous options when tuning the performance of NiFi and Elasticsearch. The following guide introduces tools for monitoring performance and validating key tuning parameters, and provides a performance tuning strategy that you can use with the component.
  - Optimizing index build and overall flow
    Optmizations are provided full index builds and for tuning parameters. Potential improvements that can be implimented for Near Real Time (NRT) index updates are not described.
  - Monitoring the metrics
    You can use Grafana and related tools to analyze the performance of the Ingest pipeline, and Kibana to do the same with Elasticsearch.
  - Tunable setup parameters
    How you can modify the values for the tunable parameters, and some default values and how they can be improved in different circumstances.
  - Scaling and hardware requirements
    You can achieve additional capacity by implementing or extending pod clustering on Elasticsearch, NiFi, or both. You can also consider the hardware footprint and key resources that impact the processing and index creation speed.
  - Elasticsearch with dedicated Auth and Live nodes
    For production environments, Elasticsearch is recommended in a clustered configuration for high availability and scalability considerations.
  - Recommended parameter values
    Two configurationsof the NiFi tunable parameter values are presented, a minimal and an optimal value.
  - Measurement
    As each deployment of HCL Commerce is different, a measured approach to modifying your defaults must be taken to successfully tune your site. The following collection of topics provides details on how to measure and troubleshoot site performance.
  - Emerald REST Caching On TS Server for Commerce 9.1
    Emerald Store is powered by the REST framework, and the cache is implemented using a REST servlet.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

HCL Commerce Version 9.1.10.0 or later

HCL Cache configurations

The HCL Cache provides a set of configuration files in YAML format. The configuration can be updated for tuning purposes, or to provide custom caches with non-default configurations. See Configurations in Helm for details on how the configuration is updated.


File	Location	Usage
/SETUP/hcl-cache/cache_cfg.yaml	Container	Created by default and present on all containers that use HCL Cache. It contains default and default configurations and must not be modified.
/SETUP/hcl-cache/cache_cfg-ext.yaml	Config Map	Extends and overwrites the configuration in cache_cfg.yaml. This file maintains the same format as cache_cfg.yaml.

Note: cache_cfg.yaml must not be modified. All customizations must be done using cache_cfg-ext.yaml and the steps documented in Configurations in Helm.

Configuration merging process

During initialization, each container performs a merging process using the default configuration file /SETUP/hcl-cache/cache_cfg.yaml, and the extensions file /SETUP/hcl-cache/cache_cfg-ext.yaml which is created from the Kubernetes' configuration map. The extensions file can be used to configure custom caches with non-default values, or to change default configurations.

Note: When overwriting list elements, such as for maintenance configurations, you must overwrite the complete list.

Default cache configurations - defaultCacheConfig: The defaultCacheConfig element defines default configurations. Custom and preset caches that are not explicitly defined in the YAML configurations take their configuration from defaultCacheConfig. If a cache is defined in the configuration file, configuration elements that are not explicitly specified use defaults from defaultCacheConfig. The defaultCacheConfig element can be overwritten using the cache_cfg-ext.yaml extension file. While defaultCacheConfig makes it easier to implement changes that apply to all caches, cache specific changes should be done at the cache level.

Example: Custom remote only cache

The default configuration enables local and remote caching. A custom remote-only cache can be defined by adding the cache under the cacheConfigs element, and setting enabled: false for the localCache element as follows:

cacheConfigs:
  ...
  services/cache/MyCustomCache:
    remoteCache:
      enabled: true  
    localCache:
      enabled: false