I want to share some best practice advice for setting the Perform Tune values in the Job Ticket (JT), specifically with the Max Page Size, Max Pages, and Max DLD Entries fields.
I've noticed a trend in customer samples that I've seen where these field values are just "maxed out", i.e. set to their maximum values as sort of a "default" setup of the JT.
For example, I'm seeing a lot of JT's with the Max Page Size field set to 99999999 (the maximum value you can enter in that field) - even when nothing close to that value is needed for the DIV's that belong to those JOB's.
And with the same customer samples I also typically see the Max Pages and Max DLD Entries fields both set to "jumbo" (which is 1000 pages and 1500 entries), or even higher - because some users think that these are the maximum values for these fields. Note: Actually that's not the case, it's only that "jumbo" is the highest pre-defined value for these fields (the max value for these fields is actually 32767 and 262144 - but I'm not sure I should be revealing that here ).
And just using these "highest" values, by default, for these fields is not a good thing to do.
Why?
Well put simply, it will have an adverse effect on XPP performance and for no really good reason (and could adversely affect the overall performance of the system running XPP as well if other things are being done besides XPP) - hence the naming of these fields as "Perform Tune" (aka performance related).
So, what is the best practice for these fields?
Set them only as high as you need, or foresee that you will need, for the DIV's that will belong to a particular JOB.
For example (with probably the easiest of the fields to determine), if you know that no individual DIV in a JOB is going to have more than 100 pages in it then don't set the Max Pages field (needlessly) to 1000 pages (jumbo). And it may be more challenging to determine the appropriate value to use for the Max Page Size and Max DLD Entries fields, but with experience using XPP you will become pretty proficient at figuring out what values you need.
And there is rarely any lasting ill effects if you do run into the situation of having values that are too small. Yes, you'll get a "fatal" error message such as "Page Buffer Overflow …", "Page ... too large for Page Buffer", or "Number of Pages exceeds maximum ...". But then all you usually need to do is increase the appropriate field in the JT and go back and compose again.
I'm going to stop there for this initial post; many will not want to bother with the details and explanation, but for those that are interested I am going to follow with further "posts" (in this thread) to further explain and even give examples showing the impact.
Jonathan Dagresta
SDL XPP Engineering