As a consumer, have you ever visited a website to make a purchase? How many times have you run into problems trying to make that purchase? Slow-loading pages? Timeout errors? A general inability to make the purchase you want to make?
While this may cause you anxiety as a consumer, you can encounter REAL anxiety if consumers experience these issues when visiting YOUR website. And real losses: a 2022 survey by an Austrian firm revealed that 60% of consumers abandon purchases due to negative experiences with a company’s website.
If Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is part of your technology stack, there is a chance that a poor AEM implementation may be causing your consumers’ problems. This article discusses how to identify and investigate AEM performance issues and how KBWEB Consult can help you solve them…before you lose your prospects.
Identifying AEM Performance Issues
Some common critical performance issues for AEM Sites include the following:
- Slow loading of pages.
- Slow creation or editing of pages.
- Slow AEM response times.
- Failure of AEM to respond to some requests.
- Slow response times in the AEM request.log.
Here are common critical performance issues for AEM Assets:
- Slow file uploads to /assets.html or /damadmin UI.
- Slow generation of thumbnails.
- Slow performance of AEM Assets operations such as move, delete, edit, and metadata update.
In addition to these issues, you may encounter others.
- Memory issues such as random crashes and OutOfMemoryError messages in the logs.
- Indexing issues such as outdated or missing search results.
- Replication issues, including queueing up of publish requests.
- Other unexpected issues in AEM performance.
As you can see, a variety of critical issues can occur in an AEM implementation. While there are technical solutions to each of these individual issues, it is more important to have a strategy to assess your AEM system and investigate any AEM issues.
Investigating AEM Performance Issues
When KBWEB Consult engages with a customer, the first and most critical phase of the project is the Discovery Phase.
The Discovery Phase
At KBWEB Consult, our primary objective during the Discovery Phase is to immerse ourselves in everything about your organization. We aim to grasp your goals, understand your audience, and pinpoint the precise features and functionalities your website needs. Armed with this comprehensive understanding, we’re poised to lay the groundwork for a website that not only meets but exceeds expectations.
The Discovery Phase kicks off with a thorough information collection process. Engaging discussions between our Project Management, User Experience, and Development teams with your key stakeholders are pivotal. These conversations are designed to crystallize the objectives of your new website (or improvement of your existing website), identify the main user personas, and meticulously outline the desired functionalities for the final product.
Analysis of an existing system
When analyzing an existing AEM implementation that exhibits performance issues, KBWEB Consult undertakes the following activities, depending upon the symptoms:
- Check for updates. Ensure that all AEM software is up-to-date. Outdated software or software versions mismatched with other software versions may cause performance issues. We have updated AEM implementations for companies like LinkedIn, providing better performance and more robust features.
- Ensure AEM is adequately maintained. Among other things, ensure that file systems, log files, and other attributes of system behavior are monitored regularly, and out-of-bounds performance is flagged.
- Analyze Java thread dumps. Use a thread analyzer such as the IBM Thread Analyzer tool to examine the thread detail and diagnose performance issues. For example, if the thread using the most CPU time is the “VM Thread” or any garbage collection thread, then there is likely a memory issue.
- Examine CPU utilization. Use a tool such as AEM 6.x’s CPU profiling tool to examine CPU utilization, examine the threads, and isolate the possible issues causing high CPU values.
- Examine caches. Optimizing the various caches within your AEM architecture is one of the quickest ways to get a big performance boost.
- Examine AEM indexing issues. Items to analyze include slow queries, timing, and failed re-indexing (although re-indexing should only be a last resort).
Solving AEM Performance Issues
Based upon our past experience with multiple customers, KBWEB Consult has developed a process to thoroughly analyze an existing AEM implementation. Your system will benefit from our knowledge of what we need to check.
Other companies, including Kaiser Permanente, LinkedIn, and Shimano have already reaped the benefits of our AEM business and technology expertise. KBWEB Consult can provide the same benefits to your firm.
Is your AEM-powered website experiencing performance issues? Let KBWEB Consult analyze your AEM implementation and provide no-obligation recommendations. The first step is to schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation.