SmartView Performance Gains Using Compression

If you have users that rely on SmartView to pull data from your Essbase and/or Planning application, many of them may have large spreadsheets.  One way to improve the perception of the performance of Essbase is the method in which SmartView (client side) communicates with the server.

APS, Planning, and HFM have the ability to take advantage of compression during the communication process.  When large queries, retrieving and submitting data, are initiated, the performance can be significant.

The default compression settings for APS and Planning are not turned on.  The good news is that turning this on is relatively simple.

Find the essbase.properties file on the APS server and change it to false.  The path to this file is different in versions 9 and 11.  In 11, the path is \Products\Essbase\aps\bin.

smartview.webservice.gzip.compression.disable=false

Open the Hyperion Planning application in question and change the SMARTVIEW_COMPRESSION_THRESHOLD in the System Properties (Administration/Manage Properties – System Properties tab) to a value no less than 1.  This threshold is the minimum size of the query in which compression will be used.  So, a value of 1000 would mean compression would be used for anything greater than 1,000 bytes.

For smaller queries, compression may not be necessary.  It may even decrease performance because of the overhead to compress and uncompress the data.  Every environment is different so there is no “right” answer as to what this value should be.

If you have used compression, please share your experiences.