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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.
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.
Connection pool
Set the size of the connection pool of the Unica Interact runtime data source using the application server console. Take into account the number of concurrent users and the connections made during the lifetime of a session, which includes loading profile, loading offer suppression, reads and writes from flowcharts, and reads from learning.

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.
    - JVM arguments
      Java™ virtual machine (JVM) arguments should be defined using startup command script or Admin Console for your web application server.
    - Connection pool
      Set the size of the connection pool of the Unica Interact runtime data source using the application server console. Take into account the number of concurrent users and the connections made during the lifetime of a session, which includes loading profile, loading offer suppression, reads and writes from flowcharts, and reads from learning.
  - 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.

Connection pool

Set the size of the connection pool of the Unica Interact runtime data source using the application server console. Take into account the number of concurrent users and the connections made during the lifetime of a session, which includes loading profile, loading offer suppression, reads and writes from flowcharts, and reads from learning.


Feature/Option	Connections Required If Enabled
At least one of the following features is enabled Load profile table Load Offer Suppression table Load Score Override table	1 connection per concurrent client call to startSession or setAudience It does not matter if only one table load or all three table loads are enabled.
Learning	2 connections
At least one logging or tracking service enabled	The value of `Interact > services > threadManagement > flushCacheToDB > maxPoolSize`. The default is 5.
Flowcharts that make at least 1 database call	The value of `Interact > flowchart > maxNumberOfFlowchartThreads`. The default is 25.

For example, if you have the following requirements.

Require that 30 concurrent calls to startSession not wait when obtaining a database connection (30)
Have learning turned on (2)
All services turned on (5)
Have at least one deployed flowchart that makes a db connection (25)
Rely on current defaults (0)

Then you should set up a database connection pool size with a minimum of 62 (30+2+5+25) for optimal performance where no single consumer of the connection will wait.

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