How to benchmark BIRT report performance?

Question

I have a BIRT report with performance problems: it takes approximately 5 minutes to run.

At the beginning I though the problem was the database: this report uses a quite complex SQL Server stored procedure to retrieve data. After a lot of SQL optimizations this procedure now takes ~20 seconds to run (in the management console).

However, the report itself still takes too much time (several minutes). How do I identify the other bottlenecks in BIRT report generation? Is there a way to profile the entire process? I'm running it using the www viewer (running inside Tomcat 5.5), and I don't have any Java event handlers, everything is done using standard SQL and JavaScript.

I watched the webinar "Designing High Performance BIRT Reports" 1, it has some interesting considerations but it didn't help much...

Answer 1

As I write this answer the question is getting close to 2 years old, so presumably you found a way around the problem. No one has offered a profiler for the entire process, so here are some ways of identifying bottle necks.

1. Start up time - About a minute can be spent here

   • running a couple reports one after the other or starting a second after the first is running can help diagnosis issues.

2. SQL Query run time - Good solutions are mentioned in the question

   • any SQL trace and performance testing will identify issues.

3. Building the report - This is where I notice the lions share of time being taken. Run a SQL trace while the report is being created. Even a relatively simple tables with lots of data can take around a minute to configure and display (HTML via apache tomcat) after the SQL trace indicates the query is done.

   • simplify the report or create a clone with fewer graphs or tables run with and without pieces to see if any create a notable difference
   • modify the query to bring back less records, less records are easier to display,

4. Delivery method PDF, Excel, HTML each can have different issues

   • try the report to different formats
   • if one is significantly greater, try different emitters.