Over time, an IBM Cognos 8 environment changes. User populations grow, processing requests tend to increase in number and complexity, and network capacity and other aspects of infrastructure may be modified.
These changes can affect IBM Cognos 8 performance. As a result, it is important to monitor and tune performance regularly.
Monitoring performance means regularly checking the status of
your IBM Cognos 8 installation and its resources. IBM Cognos
8 provides metrics 
for checking the performance of the system,
servers, dispatchers, or services. You can set thresholds for metrics to
identify when the performance exceeds or falls short of expected
ranges. You can configure the system to notify anyone who should
be made aware of the problem when a performance issue occurs.
Tuning can involve adjustments in the following areas:
databases
Keep your databases optimized for querying and reporting.
application servers
Adjust your application server memory and connection settings as required for better performance.
Web servers
Tune your Web server for maximum performance.
IBM Cognos 8
Monitor and tune various aspects of your IBM Cognos 8 system.
Perform additional tuning as required. This can involve modifying PDF rendering settings, changing low bandwidth connections, performing regular disk maintenance, and other tasks.
After a certain point, performance tuning efforts yield diminishing returns. A growing user population, and increased processing demands, will eventually require you to consider increasing system capacity. To improve IBM Cognos 8 performance, you can scale vertically by using more powerful servers, or scale horizontally by adding servers and balancing the processing load among your servers. For more information about determining IBM Cognos 8 capacity requirements, see Capacity Planning. For information about other tuning and maintenance tasks, see the Installation and Configuration Guide.
