Lumira & Explorer

Garbage Collection for SAP Lumira

SAP Lumira 2_0 Designer Splash Screen

I recently installed the Lumira 2.1 SP1 add-on as part of upgrading a customer to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence SP5. Then I performed a landscape analysis using the SAP BI Platform Support Tool, as I’m always curious what kinds of observations it makes.

The Platform Support Tool currently has an alert regarding the default garbage collection method for SAP Lumira.

Checks the command line on all APS servers with a “LumiraServerServiceContainer” service for the argument “-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC”. Alert is triggered if the argument is missing.

Sometimes the Platform Support Tool makes a recommendation I’m not familiar with, so I try to confirm the recommendation against the SAP knowledge base. In this case, I found SAP KB 2578661, which recommends switching from "-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC" (the garbage collector recommended by the Platform Support Tool) to "-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200 -XX:+UseStringDeduplication", which are default settings for the Lumira 2.1 SP1 Adaptive Processing Server.

I assume that the Lumira rule will be revisited in a future release of the Platform Support Tool (UPDATE: version 2.1 SP2 will give specific guidance depending on the Lumira version detected). But in the meantime, I kept the default settings intact. This customer is brand-new to Lumira and it will be a few weeks or months before there are Lumira Designer dashboards to test. But we’ll be ready, as CA ADM Introscope is installed as part of the BI landscape. We’ll be able to monitor in real-time how well the Lumira Adaptive Processing Server performs garbage collection with production dashboards and make changes if we see a benefit.

Have you made any interesting modifications to Lumira settings, documented or otherwise?

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Dallas Marks

Dallas Marks

I am an analytics and cloud architect, author, and trainer. An AWS certified blogger, SAP Mentor Alumni and co-author of the SAP Press book SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence: The Comprehensive Guide, I prefer piano keyboards over computer keyboards when not blogging or tweeting.

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4 thoughts on “Garbage Collection for SAP Lumira”

  1. Hi Dallas,
    Thanks for the article. Your instincts are correct. There has been some recent guidance released from Lumira development team that recommends using the Garbage-First Garbage Collector (-XX:+UseG1GC) for all versions of the Lumira Server service. This alert will be corrected in the next patch version (2.1 Patch 2).
    Cheers
    Toby

    1. Need to add, the G1GC is recommended for all versions of 2.x Lumira Service, Not 1.3

    2. The use of (-XX:+UseG1GC) is only recommended for Lumira 2.0 and newer. Lumira 1.31 should still continue to use (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC) which is the version the alert was created for. As Toby mentioned, the alert will be corrected in the next patch to account for each scenario. Another item worth mentioning is that the default gc setting you’ll see in Lumira 2.0 is different than the version referenced in this article. The garbage collector settings defaulted to (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC) in Lumira 2.0 whereas the server uses (-XX:+UseG1GC) by default in 2.1 SP1.

      1. Gentlemen,

        Thanks for these updates. Just curious, is the Lumira team using CA Introscope to determine the best GC or some other means of analysis? In any case, it might be some nerdy fun for somebody at SAP to blog how Introscope can be used to monitor Lumira and boost customer adoption of Introscope by showing its value in this particular situation.

        Again, thanks for weighing in,
        Dallas

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