PeopleTools 8.52 added a performance enhancement for systems that have multiple pagelets on a page. Previously pagelets were loaded in a sequential fashion, one after another. With this enhancement the pagelets can be loaded in a parallel fashion allowing your pages to load faster. Oracle indicates that a page with seven pagelets can reduce it’s loading time by 15%.
With 8.53.01 this setting is delivered enabled, but in 8.52 this feature is not enabled. In fact, the configuration setting does not even exist. You have to add it manually. That was apparently an misstep by the development team according to Oracle support [ID 1503803.1].
To enable this option in 8.52 add the line
parallelLoading=true
to your configuration.properties file which is located at <PS_HOME>/<domain name>/applications/peoplesoft/PORTAL.war/WEB-INF/psftdocs/<site name>/configuration.properties. Jolt pooling is also required for this setting.
If you deploy lots of pagelets on your homepage you may want to do some performance analysis of how your system will handle peak times prior to enabling this feature. Adding lots of pagelets to the homepage, especially in Portal / Interaction HUB, should be done with caution particularly in older versions of PeopleSoft. I’d really like to post a detailed article on this topic with an analysis of how 8.52 and 8.53 may have improved how this type of configuration responds. But if I had to sum it up in one sentence it would be this. While some analysts, developers, or management types may think it’s a great idea to provide data to the user in Portal / Interaction HUB in the form of pagelets upon logon, it can have a substantial impact on system performance and possibly even bring down your systems. It needs to be tested thoroughly and under substantial load. Parallel Pagelet Loading may help alleviate some of the issues I’ve seen in the past, but I will need to test it first hand to know.
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