RE: FLASH: ANN: Generator 2 (is: Gen throughput)

[John Dowdell]

At 5:19 PM 5/22/0, .redstar. wrote:

> Thanks for the explanation, perhaps you could suggest that the

> Generator team revise the text that is currently online as it

> will clearly induce in error... Anyway if the developer edition

> doesn't watermark the produced files then it is a good deal.


Thanks for the catch, and I'm sorry I didn't recognize the situation

immediately... as Diane noted, you found an older Generator document on the

site that was still accessible yesterday, and it has since been removed.


Re "What has watermarks?": Only served content from the free 30-day trial

contains watermarks. The Developer Edition serves real content, as does the

Enterprise Edition. (This free trial lets you proof a project for a client,

so you have a real deliverable to show them before billing them for either

the single-graphic server or the high-performance server.)



> The available docs on this product say that it only generates one

> graphic at a time, OK. From the FigLeaf study we can obtain an

> overestimate of 2 seconds to produce a complex database dependent

> graphic on a 1 processor 128Mb machine.... each user views each

> page for 30 seconds on average, then we have 120 page requests

> per user/hour.


I almost certainly snipped unfairly here, forgive me. I think we're going

to "What's the throughput for the Macromedia Generator Developer Edition?"

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a firm answer to that... environmental

variables play a huge role.


What we *do* have is that the Developer Edition processes a single data-fed

graphic at a time. It also doesn't have the new caching methods that are

built in to the high-performance Enterprise Edition, so it's prey to

whatever simultaneous network requests your content demands.


The server hardware definitely plays a role in net performance, as do the

other tasks being performed by that server. The content plays a role: a

template with more data feeds will require more work than a simpler

template. The data source(s) play a huge role... if all data arrives with

the request then that's usually much quicker than if the request triggers a

database query on another server.


I'm sorry I can't give a reliable graphics-generated-per-second estimate...

often we see half-a-dozen new graphics per second, but it could be higher,

could be lower, depending on the environment and the generation tasks. I

can't predict a useful graphics-per-second rate just from knowing the

generation engine alone. (Note that time required by the server is distinct

from time until delivery... it takes the browser a bit to receive and

display the generated graphic too.)


Summary: Even though the Developer Edition creates only one graphic at a

time, you'd have to generate a good few hundred files every minute to push

past it. The load definitely varies with the content.



> Conclusion : Not to bad for the price, not bad at all.


Cool, I hope you can use this to success in your own work. Please holler to

wish-generatormacromedia [dot] com

 if we need to change things on our end,

thanks in advance.



jd








John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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