In
WebSpeed requestround-trip, there are quite a few steps that make up the entire round-trip process and possibly quite a few separate machines, ranging from the Web server, firewalls, NameServer, WebSpeed server (broker and agents), and probably a database as well. Each of these steps introduces performance challenges of their own. The Web server must cope with not only the WebSpeed requests, but the normal HTML requests as well. Firewalls can introduce network latency, as some will inspect each packet to make sure it is "allowed" before passing it through to the next machine in the process. The NameServer performance issues are covered in the previous section.
The WebSpeed broker and agents have a role to play in performance as well. The broker launches and configures new WebSpeed agents before they are needed. This enables the requests that are being received to wait as short a time as possible in the broker's request queue. The launching of a new agent will take a period of time—the agent itself needs to be loaded into memory, possibly run some application code to create super procedures, and connect itself to the database. To keep free agents, you should set the Minimum agents to a number higher than 0. This setting controls how many agents the broker will keep free, up to the Maximum agents.
Consider the case of a broker that will start five agents. It will keep at least two free agents at all times unless it has already launched the maximum number of agents, which is 10. Agents that are not used for a period of time will be eliminated. The Auto Trim Timeout setting in the broker's Advanced Features tab controls this time period and is entered as a number of seconds, so the default of 1800 is equivalent to 30 minutes.
