Ask the expert AEM Assets best practices 092016

Editor's Notes

1. Hello Everyone, My name is Abhishek Dwevedi . I am Technical Training Instructor with Adobe . I have got James Talbot , Gary Thain and Juliet Johnson from my team and they will happy to answer your questions while this session. AEM Assets is a crucial part of delivering high-quality digital marketing experiences that contribute to the achievement of business goals through increasing your content velocity. If you work with a large number of assets within AEM Assets or regularly/periodically upload numerous assets, including videos and dynamic media then optimizing your digital asset management experience is critical for system efficiency. In this session I will be sharing various recommended , documented and known best practices and approaches for AEM Assets which will be useful for Authors ,Developers and AEM system administrator.
2. The agenda for this session includes various best practices on AEM Assets and
3. Poor performance in digital asset management can impact the user experience in three ways: interactive performance, asset processing, and download speed.  Interactive performance is the time it takes from receiving the HTTP request to closing the HTTP response, It is measured in terms of page response time. This This can be determined from the request log files. A Typical target performance is a page response time below two seconds. An Asset processing is when users are uploading assets and it takes minutes until assets are readily converted and ingested into AEM DAM. Typical target performance depends on the size and type of assets processed and the number of renditions. E.g below ten seconds for images smaller than 1280x1280 pixels using standard renditions below one minute for images smaller than 100 MB using standard renditions below five minutes for HD video clips shorter than one minute Throughput is when downloading from AEM Assets takes long and thumbnails do not show up immediately when browsing the DAM Admin or the DAM Finder. Throughput performance is measured in terms of download rate in kilobits per second. Typical target performance is 300 kilobits per second for 100 concurrent downloads.  Now let’s find out what are the common and possible performance pitfall areas with some solutions :
4. Network connection to end user : A slow network connection can cause throughput issues . Sometimes the users have a slow connection from the ISP, especially in intranets . This can be a sign of incorrect network topology So a network topology review may help in such situation .
5. Local File System : A slow local file system can cause interactive performance problems, especially when it comes to search, because the search indexes are stored on the local disk.
6. AEM Asset Finder Interactive performance problems are often experienced in searches that are caused by high CPU utilization due to many concurrent users or other CPU-consuming processes on the same instance. Moving from virtual machines to dedicated machines and making sure no other services run on the machine can help improving performance. If high CPU load is caused due to asset processing and many concurrent users, Adobe recommends adding additional nodes in such scenarios..
7. AEM Asset Workflow Long-running workflow processes during asset ingestion cause asset processing performance problems. Depending on the type of assets being processed, this can indicate CPU over-utilization. Adobe recommends that you reduce the number of other processes running on the system and to increase the number of available CPUs by adding cluster nodes.
8. NAS Connectivity Poor network connectivity to the network attached storage causes interactive performance problems, because accessing new nodes during asset processing is slowed down due to network latency. Additionally, slow network throughput adversely affects throughput, but also asset processing performance, because loading and saving renditions is slowed down. Reasons for bad latency and throughput in a NAS are usually network topology or NAS over-utilization by other services. Over-used network attached storage systems can cause an array of problems: Low disk space is a frequently encountered trouble that can be prevented through proper sizing of a Assets project. High disk latency will propagate into slow access times for CRX and may result in interactive performance problems. Low disk throughput may result in low performance for AEM Assets. Now let’s see some common tweaks and strategies in AEM Assets that may help in increasing and stablising performance.
9. Adobe recommends enabling HTTPS because many companies have firewalls that sniff HTTP traffic, which adversely impacts uploads and corrupts files. For large file upload , prefer wired connections instead of wireless. -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC = Enable Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) Collector -Doak.queryLimitInMemory=500000 -Doak.queryLimitReads=100000 -Dupdate.limit=250000 -Doak.fastQuerySize=true The DAM Update Asset workflow contains a full suite of steps that are configured for tasks, such as Scene7 PTIFF generation and InDesign Server integration. However, most users may not require several of these steps. Adobe recommends you create a custom copy of the DAM Update Asset workflow model, and remove any unnecessary steps. In this case, update the launchers for DAM Update Asset to point to the new model. Transient Workflow : To optimize high ingestion loads, Adobe suggests switching the DAM Update and XMP Metadata Writeback workflow to a transient workflow. As the name implies, runtime data related to the intermediate work steps in transient workflows are not persisted in the JCR when they run (the output renditions are persisted of course). It causes a 10% reduction in the workflow processing time and significantly reduces repository growth. No more CRUD workflows are required to purge. In addition, it reduces the number of TAR files to compact. If your business dictates persisting/archiving workflow runtime data for audit purposes, do not enable this feature. Selective rendition generation: only generate the renditions you need by adding conditions to the asset processing workflow, so that more costly renditions are only generated for select assets. /workflow/ Dam Updtae Asset >> Process Thumbnails step. Shared data store among instances: Implementing an S3 or Shared File Datastore can help to save disk space and increase network throughput in large-scale implementations. However there may be other additional task in maintaining such deployement. But this can be a good tradeoff for better performance. Normally, you should run purging workflows on a weekly basis. However, in resource-intensive scenarios, such as during wide-scale asset ingestion, you can run it more frequently. https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/remove-web-rendition-dimension-limit.html. https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/cqbufferedimagecache-consumes-heap-during-asset-uploads.html http://cq-ops.tumblr.com/post/120964732659/new-workflow-features-in-aem-61
10. Assets workflow offloader lets you enable multiple instances of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets to reduce and distribute the processing load on the primary (Leader) instance. Distributing the processing load of assets increases the efficiency and speed with which AEM Assets processes assets. In addition, it helps allocate dedicated resources to process assets of a particular MIME type. For example, you can allocate a specific node in your topology to process InDesign assets only. https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/administer/content/workflow-offloader.html
11. So let’s do a hand’s on and see how it works. Step 1. We need two instance one is called leader instances and other one is offloader instance. Step 2. Configure Topogly in offloading instance , go to system console > Sling > Topology Management > Configure discovery service >Add Leader’s connector service URL to property . Step 3. Go to Leader instance . Configure white list Ips to allow host names for the connection request on leader instance. Step 4. Go to Leader Instance , Disable topic from offloading console. Topic: com/adobe/granite/workflow/offloading Only for Leader. Step 5. Go to Leader Instance and workflow launcher and change DAM Update Asset workflow to DAM Update Asset Offloading. Step 6. Go to Offloader Instance and disable launchers for DAM Update Asset.
12. https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/administer/content/assets/best-practices-for-assets/assets-sizing-guide.html  When sizing the environment for an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets implementation, it is important to ensure that there are sufficient resources available in terms of disk, CPU, memory, IO, and network throughput. Sizing of these resources requires an understanding of how many assets are being loaded into the system. If a better metric is not available, you can divide the size of the existing library by the age of the library to find the rate at which assets are created.ware and software components that can affect performance.  A common mistake made when sizing the required disk space for an Assets implementation is to base the calculations on the size of the raw images to be ingested into the system. By default, AEM creates three renditions in addition to the original image for use in rendering the AEM UI elements. In previous implementations, these renditions have been observed to assume twice the size of the assets that are ingested. Shared Datastores For large datastores, you can implement a shared datastore either through a shared file datastore on a network attached drive or through an S3 datastore. In this case, individual instances need not maintain a copy of the binaries. In addition, a shared datastore facilitates binary-less replication and helps reduce the bandwidth used to replicate assets to publish environments or offloading instances. - It can be used to authors and publish instances. Adobe recommends sharing the datastore between a primary author instance and offload author instances to reduce overheads in workflow offloading. You can also share the datastore between the author and publish instances to minimize the traffic during replication. Owing to some pitfalls, sharing a datastore is not recommended in all cases. Single Point of Failure Increased Complexity for operations like Garbage Collections Currently, Adobe has not tested the system for loading greater than 1.2 million assets. AEM currently lets you upload up to 2GB of assets at a time. 
13. The number of communication channels is increasing rapidly ranging from mobile device to tablets to screens. However, you (probably) do not want to use exactly the same content for all channels you need to optimize your content according to the specific channel For an e.g. Description of product on e-commerce site can be longer for desktops screens but it may be smaller for mobile devices. With content fragments you can: consider how to reach target audiences efficiently across channels create and manage channel-neutral editorial content (including text, images, video) build content pools for a range of channels design content variations for specific channels.
14. Tags are a quick and easy method of classifying content within your website. For Assets tag is a piece of metadata that help you to find the asset when you want to use it.
15. Sharing assets with AEM directly will require creating a user and assigning appropriate permissions. This can be a tedious job if you have to share the same asset to hundreds of users. The better approach to share assets with anonymous user , partner or an existing user is Link Sharing. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets (on demand) lets you share assets, folders, and collections as a URL with members of your organization and external entities, including partners and vendors.  Sharing assets through a link is a convenient way of making them available to external parties without them having to first log in to AEM Assets.
16. Dynamic Media helps in delivering rich visual merchandising and marketing assets on demand, It is automatically scaled for consumption on web, mobile, and social sites. Dynamic Media can generates and deliver multiple variations of rich content in real time through its global, scalable, performance-optimized network. Dynamic imaging : Generate and display unlimited variations of any asset, easily changing the size, format, resolution, crop, or effect on demand, using original imagery. Responsive and interactive viewers : Create visually rich media, such as zoom and pan, 360-degree spin, color swatches, and mixed media viewers, in real time, from original assets. Shoppable media : Add interactive hotspots and link product detail into your featured campaigns, video, and other media. Add interactive hotspots and link product detail into your featured campaigns, video,, and other media. Using media asset templates, non-technical marketers can change content and properties of images and display banners.