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Tuning Guide
An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
About tuning Unica Interact for best performance
An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
Interactive flowchart management
Every interactive flowchart requires at least one thread to run. You can monitor a live system to see whether there are enough threads for all the interactive flowcharts.

Tuning Guide
An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
- About tuning Unica Interact for best performance
  An installation of Unica Interact consists of several components including third-party tools (such as web application servers, databases, and load balancers) and components such as Unica Platform and Unica Campaign. All of these components have several properties, features, and settings you can configure to improve performance.
  - Cache management
    In a large-volume Unica Interact environment where you are using a large number of runtime servers, you can use cache management software to share the runtime load among the servers and improve the real-time performance of the runtime server group as a whole. When you enable cache management solution comes with Unica Interact you can use multiple run time servers fronted by a load balancer. The load balancer balances the workload across the runtime servers in the group, and helps to maintain something called session affinity, which means that when an incoming session is handled by runtime server A, then when the same user issues additional requests, those requests are fulfilled by the session on server A. This method of balancing connections among the runtime servers in the group can improve performance considerably, but has some limitations because all of the session information is maintained in memory, and the memory limits of each Java™ virtual machine (JVM) restrict how much session information can be maintained. Unica Interact supports two cache management solutions by default:
  - Interact API
    Use the Java™ Serialization API instead of SOAP API. The Serialization API provides better throughput (can be 5-10 times more depending on the application configuration) and a shorter response time.
  - Installation and network configuration
    If the Unica Interact server is required to maintain session data across multiple Unica Interact API calls and you are using the Ehcache cache manager to improve performance, use sticky load balancing and local session management instead of distributed session management.
  - Interactive flowchart management
    Every interactive flowchart requires at least one thread to run. You can monitor a live system to see whether there are enough threads for all the interactive flowcharts.
  - Service tuning
  - Web application server tuning
    Within Unica Interact, you tune the web application by modifying JVM arguments and connections. The JVM arguments affect throughput and startup time. The number of connections you use is determined by the features you have enabled.
  - Tuning terminology
    System tuning has specific definitions for common terms.
  - Database tuning
    Database tuning involves adding indexes to specific tables and updating statistics.
  - ETL Tuning
    When you configure the contact and response history module, the module uses a background Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process to move data from the runtime staging tables to the Unica Campaign contact and response history tables.
  - Logging
    Make sure the log level is set to INFO or ERROR. Never use a verbose log setting like DEBUG or TRACE in a production environment.

Interactive flowchart management

Every interactive flowchart requires at least one thread to run. You can monitor a live system to see whether there are enough threads for all the interactive flowcharts.

Using JMX console, monitor the JMX statistics CurrentJobsInProcessBoxQueue and CurrentJobsInSchedulerQueue under com.unicacorp.interact.flowchart. Ideally, they should be zero even under peak load, which implies there are enough threads to handle the requests for flowchart executions.

Note: Running the JMX console does impact performance. You should not run the JMX console in a production environment except when diagnosing an issue.

You can control these queues with the number of threads used by interactive flowcharts. You set flowchart thread pool sizes in Unica for Unica Interact runtime under Interact > flowchart.

Set maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads to be at least the maximum number of concurrent users expected on the Unica Interact client. For example, if the maximum number of concurrent users is 50 and each call to segmentation runs one flowchart, set maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads to 50.
Set maxNumberOfProcessBoxThreads based on the average number of concurrent paths in the flowcharts and whether the flowcharts are CPU bound or I/O bound. It should be at least equal to maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads. For example, if the average number of concurrent paths in the flowcharts is 2 and all the process boxes are CPU bound, set maxNumberOfProcessBoxThreads to be 2*maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads. If the process boxes are I/O bound (for example if they perform database lookups or writes, such as a Select or Snapshot process), then that number might need to be set to a larger value.
Set minNumberOfFlowchartThreads to be the same as maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads. Likewise, set minNumberOfProcessBoxThreads to be the same as maxNumberOfProcessBoxThreads.

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