Promotion performance tuning

WebSphere Commerce provides business users with multiple features and functionality to help enhance developing promotions for a store. However, planning is required to use the various techniques available to achieve and maintain wanted site performance.

• Promotion evaluation considerations
  When we are designing promotions for the site, consider how your promotions are being evaluated. How you design your promotions and configure your promotion evaluation process can affect the site performance during promotion evaluation. When we are creating promotions, consider the promotion type, the promotion conditions, the size of orders that are evaluated, and the agenda builder used for promotion evaluation.

• Promotion agenda builder considerations
  When the promotion engine is invoked, an agenda builder is first used to determine the active promotions for an order. The specific promotion agenda builder the site uses and the number of active promotions for the site can affect the performance of the promotion evaluation process.

• CalculationCodeListDataBean considerations
  If the store uses the CalculationCodeListDataBean to show promotion-related information for catalog entries or categories, your settings can affect storefront performance. When we use the CalculationCodeListDataBean, performance can be affected by the number of customer segments and conditions specified for promotions, and whether you disable any unused functionality.

• Promotion types and conditions considerations
  When we are creating promotions in Management Center, certain promotion types and conditions can affect the store performance.

• Unique promotion code generation considerations
  If the site uses promotions that require unique promotion codes, the generation, or import of these codes can affect performance. Generating, or importing millions of unique promotion codes when we are working on approved content can result in a reduction in performance. We can reduce the effect on performance when you generate or import codes by using batch updates to insert the codes into the database.

• Configure PromotionArgument database records to reduce locking conflicts
  We can configure the site to use PromotionArgument records from multiple database tables to reduce database table locking issues, and improve overall storefront performance.

• Disable unused queries for the shopping cart agenda builder
  If the store uses only Management Center to create and update promotions, we can improve promotion performance by disabling unnecessary queries for promotions.

• Performance considerations for the best deal feature
  The best deal feature provides a way to ensure that our customers get the best deal possible when their order qualifies for multiple promotions in the same promotion group with the same priority. There is, however, a performance cost for the feature because the promotion engine must evaluate a potentially large number of sequence combinations to determine the best deal. To manage performance impacts, we can raise or lower the default upper limit for the number of sequence evaluations per order.

Related concepts
Performance considerations for the best deal feature

Related tasks
Configure PromotionArgument database records to reduce locking conflicts
Configure the promotion engine
Disable unused queries for the shopping cart agenda builder

Related reference
Promotion agenda builder considerations
Unique promotion code generation considerations
Promotion evaluation considerations
CalculationCodeListDataBean considerations
Promotion performance tuning
Promotion types and conditions considerations
Marketing performance tuning
WebSphere Commerce default tunables