Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Hello colleagues,

anyone who has experience with http event agent for mercator 6.5 or 6.7? Is this a stable solution?
It is supposed to be part of integration broker, but i could not find it in there and in the doc they only talk about mercator6.0 event agent.
Maybe it is better to generate servlets from the maps?

Thanks,
Frank
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

The event agent is another product that needs to be purchased.
I think it is a pretty stable product, not seen too many issues with it.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Depending on what you are wanting to do, you may also want to look at Ascential RTI
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Currently using Agent for 6.5.2, Win2K. It's been pretty stable. Depending on who you talk to here there is some concern about response time while multithreading under heavy loads.

I noted however that most of our response time was not due to the Agent or the map itself. The time was extended once the data was handed off to non-datastage tx applications.

Regardless, we load tested on a national site and compared our results to those of our peers. We were consistantly in the top 3 performance wise.

Keep in mind that, at least through version 6.5.2, you can't install the EA in a clustered environment.

jvanboga
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Thanks,

Interesting feed back. We were wondering about performance, but your experience seems to be positif.

It cannot run in a clustered environment. Meaning that the agents are all stand alone instances that will not cover for each other?

Frank
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

We use one agent on a standalone server. That agent manages all of our HTTP traffic used in DataStage TX. Initially we wanted to install it as part of our existing web cluster just in case one box failed another would pick it up. We finally had a Mercator consultant come in to try configuring it within the cluster. Spent a week, couldn't get it to work with 6.5.2. We may have had some factors that complicated things though. Installed it on a stand alone no problems. (If clustering is crittical you might want to look at RTI. I don't know anything about it but I'd think it would be a required feature.)

At this time the agent is running on a 500 Mhz desktop with 250MB ram and a small HDD. We aren't using the box for anything else. DataStage TX is installed on it's own, separate, server.

Once you start testing there are some settings in the mercator.ini, DataStage TX, file that may help performance. Also, within each msd I create two instances of the watch.

jvanboga

PS: "...but your experience seems to be positif. "

{depends on who you talk to. Our web developers think they can write a faster app. We load tested internally with a Grinder script. Our tests hit the agent with anywhere from 5 - 100 simutanious queries recycling the hits every 3 seconds for 25 - 75 cycles. They thought that performace was poor. We had a failure rate of well below 1%.

Our national association tested 1 - 3 simultanious hits every 3 - 5 seconds for a specified number of cycles. The only failures were anticipated.

Currently we average only 300 hits per day (300 queries + 300 responses) and haven't had any problems with the Agent. Tansactions are usually under 1kb each way. Most activity occurs in a 10 hour window. So far, its been more stable than the DataStage TX server which handles all our EDI activity as well. blah, blah, BLAH.....}
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