Performance
The article details the performance characteristics and optimization schemes adopted by the connector.
The connector is optimized to update Litium Studio when information in InRiver changes. Many factors affects the performance of integration, and many are directly related to the hardware/software environment the Integration is running.
Hardware environment
Always follow the InRiver recommended hardware configuration for both machines that run InRiver server and Litium Studio server.
It is important that both machines have a similar hardware configuration because making one server machine stronger will only make the integration to run at the speed of lower performance machine.
A rough analogy to assertain performance
Following is not a very precise method, but still will give you an idea of approximate time it might take for an update to transfer to Litium Studio.
The approximate amount of time for a single complete product to be created and published from InRiver to Litium Studio is approximately = 2 x file copy time
e.g: Suppose a InRiver Product has 2 Items, and each Item has 2 different Image resources. In total it is 7 InRiver entities (1 product + 2 items + 4 resources). The approximate time to transfer all information is roughly twice the time it takes to copy these 7 files between InRiver server and Litium Studio server.
Note that it might be slower than the predicted result here when both InRiver and Litium Studio running inside a single machine, and when the InRiver recommended hardware configuration is not followed for both machines.
Performance optimizations
The inRiver connector uses following strategies to shorten the publishing time to Litium Studio.
- The xml data files from inRiver are only updated if the actual data changes. If it doesn't the files in the integration folder will not change. If you have mirrored the integration folder from inRiver server machine to Litium Studio server machine there will not be any additional cost on re-publishing an already published channel. The only things transfered will be the things modified.
- Litium Studio will import data only if a newer version exists in the integration folder. (However Specification data will always be imported, and therefore an inRiver item having a specification connected to it will cause studio to re-import them each time its specification data changes)
- When an entity is removed from channel in inRiver, connector decides the best strategy to move the entity from the "Published" state (so it is not publicly visible) and does not necessarily deletes the entity from Litium Studio. If the entity is added back to channel, re-publishing is faster in particular for large image files.