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In the old 4.5 days of the Plumtree Portal, it was important to install a separate, dedicated Administration Server in the portal infrastructure. The need for such a server in versions 5 and 6 of the Plumtree Portal (aka Plumtree Foundation, aka AquaLogic User Interaction) is greatly mitigated by the option to delegate CPU-intensive operations [...]

If you change the ACL on a folder in the portal (Administrative or Knowledge Directory), you’re prompted with a question like this: In general (unless it’s a very small folder), if you do want security to propagate, you should select “Yes” for this prompt. What this will do is create a JOB in the Intrinsic [...]

Here’s a neat (albeit relatively trivial) trick: Ever notice when you go to some web sites, the default icon changes from the little IE or FireFox icon? You can do that for your portal too, and it’s simple. Just create a small icon (16×16), save it as “favicon.ico”, and put it in the root directory [...]

We’ve touched on this time and again – optimizing your Aqualogic Portal is tricky because there are so many moving parts. We’ve talked about optimizations on the front end (image server), back end (portlet servers), and today I’d like to share a diagram that covers a lot of the HTTP requests in between. The following [...]

Here’s a quick and easy tip: when someone reports the ALUI Portal is “slow”, have them do a View:Source on the page and scroll to the bottom. There they should see an HTML comment on how long it took for the page to render: Not only can you see what server the page was loaded [...]

In my last post, I talked about all the HTTP requests that are made during a single ALUI portal page request. One of the things you may have noticed was that all HTTP requests were routed through the portal and the portal gateway. In cases where you’ve got portlet HTML that needs to be aggregated [...]

A complaint that comes up all the time is “The portal is slow”. And from the end-users’ perspective, this can be true – users shouldn’t have to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to load. But that simple statement overlooks the fact that there are many different servers involved in the [...]

I was recently at a client site who was having problems with their Single Sign-On Settings. They were using RSA ClearTrust with ALUI running behind WebLogic 8.1 and were seeing performance issues related to SSO. We started troubleshooting the problem by looking at a combination of RSA settings, the portalconfig.xml, and various settings on Apache [...]

One of the most-overlooked concepts in multi-tiered architectures like the ALUI portal is caching. I am constantly reminding clients about the nature of the HTTP transactions made for a portal page: “browser to portal, portal to back-end server”. I’ve touched on the first transaction a bit (more to come on this!), but today I wanted [...]

Errors are never pretty to users who just want their portal to work. But sometimes they’re inevitable, such as when a user cancels the Basic Authentication prompt when SSO is configured in the portal. Here’s how you can make them a little prettier. All app servers (we’ll use IIS in this example) allow you to [...]