Hardware Sizing Guidelines hardware-sizing-guidelines

These sizing guidelines offer an approximation of the hardware resources required to deploy an AEM project. Sizing estimates depend on the architecture of the project, the complexity of the solution, expected traffic, and the project requirements. This guide helps you to determine the hardware needs for a specific solution, or to find an upper and lower estimate for the hardware requirements.

Basic factors to consider are (in this order):

Architecture architecture

A typical AEM setup consists of an author and a publish environment. These environments have different requirements regarding the underlying hardware size and system configuration. Detailed considerations for both environments are described in the author environment and publish environment sections.

In a typical project setup, you have several environments on which to stage project phases:

Also, the environments may vary, ranging from a single-server system running AEM and an application server, through to a highly scaled set of multi-server, multi-CPU clustered instances. Adobe recommends that you use a separate computer for each production system and that you do not run other applications on these computers.

Generic hardware sizing considerations generic-hardware-sizing-considerations

The sections below provide guidance on how to calculate hardware requirements, taking various considerations into account. For large systems, Adobe suggests that you perform a simple set of in-house benchmark tests on a reference configuration.

Performance optimization is a fundamental task that needs to be performed before any benchmarking for a specific project can be done. Make sure to apply the advice provided in the Performance Optimization documentation before performing any benchmark tests and using their results for any hardware sizing calculations.

Hardware sizing requirements for advanced use cases need to be based on a detailed performance assessment of the project. Characteristics of advanced use cases requiring exceptional hardware resources include combinations of:

Disk Space/ Hard Drive disk-space-hard-drive

The disk space required depends heavily on both the volume and type of your web application. The calculations should account for the following:

Disk space is continuously monitored during Online, and Offline, Revision Cleanup. Should the available disk space drop below a critical value, the process is canceled. The critical value is 25% of the current disk footprint of the repository and it is not configurable. Adobe recommends sizing the disk at least two or three times larger than the repository size including the estimated growth.

Virtualization virtualization

AEM runs well in virtualized environments, but there can be factors such as CPU or I/O that cannot be directly equated to physical hardware. A recommendation is to choose a higher I/O speed (in general) as this is a critical factor, usually. Benchmarking your environment is necessary to get a precise understanding of what resources are required.

Parallelization of AEM Instances parallelization-of-aem-instances

Fail Safeness

A fail-safe website is deployed on at least two separate systems. If one system breaks down, another system can take over and thus compensate the system failure.

System resources scalability

While all systems are running, an increased computational performance is available. That additional performance is not necessarily linear with the number of cluster nodes as the relationship is highly dependent on the technical environment. See Cluster documentation for more information.

The estimation of how many cluster nodes are necessary is based on the basic requirements and specific use-cases of the particular web project:

Hardware Recommendations hardware-recommendations

Usually you can use the same hardware for your author environment as is recommended for your publishing environment. Typically, website traffic is lower on authoring systems, but cache efficiency is lower too. However, the fundamental factor here is the number of authors working in parallel, together with the type of actions being made to the system. In general, AEM clustering (of the author environment) is most effective at scaling read operations; in other words, a AEM cluster scales well with authors who are performing basic edit operations.

Additional Use-case Specific Calculations additional-use-case-specific-calculations

In addition to the calculation for a default web application, consider specific factors for the following use-cases. The calculated values are to be added to the default calculation.

Assets-specific Considerations assets-specific-considerations

Extensive processing of digital assets requires optimized hardware resources, the most relevant factors are image size and the peak throughput of processed images.

Allocate at least 16GB of heap and configure the DAM Update Asset workflow to use the Camera Raw package for the ingestion of raw images.

Multi-Site Manager multi-site-manager

The resource consumption when using AEM MSM on an authoring environment depends heavily on the specific use cases. Basic factors are:

Testing the planned use case with a representative content excerpt can help you improve your understanding of the resource consumption. If you extrapolate the results with the planned throughput, you can assess the additional resources required for the AEM MSM.

Also, account for authors working in parallel. They will perceive performance side effects if AEM MSM use cases consume more resources than planned.

AEM Communities Sizing Considerations aem-communities-sizing-considerations

AEM sites that include AEM Communities features (community sites) experience a high level of interaction from site visitors (members) in the publish environment.

The sizing considerations for a community site depend on the anticipated interaction by community members and whether optimal performance for page content is of higher importance.

User-generated content (UGC) submitted members is stored separately from page content. While the AEM platform uses a node store that replicates site content from author to publish, AEM Communities uses a single, common store for UGC that is never replicated.

For the UGC store, it is necessary to choose a storage resource provider (SRP), which influences the chosen deployment.
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