A published EASAP may be preloaded on an EASAP Server to shorten the time between when a User selects an EASAP and the time when the EASAP opens in a browser.

Preload is designed to improve performance for Excel EASAP's.

Opening times should be shorter as the preloaded instance will already have allocated a free Excel process allocated to the EASAP prior to a User opening the EASAP.

Once the number of free Excel processes drops below a certain threshold the preloader will wait until more processes are free before allocating these scarce resources to preload another EASAP.

Thus on an Excel Server under heavy load (ie. few free Excel processes) the preload capability will have limited utility.

• In summary, priority should be given to EASAP's which are,
  • most frequently accessed
  • slowest to load

• set a list of EASAP's to preload in,
  • <SERVERDATA>\easa\admin\config\context.properties
    • add an EASAP to preload by adding its path (shown at EASA→Author→Applications)
    • for example to add Mortgage Calculator add the following line,
      • preloaded.easap.ids.1=examples/tutorial_mort_calc
      • increment the 1 above for each subsequent EASAP

• Additionally,
  • in <SERVERDATA>\easa\admin\config\context.properties
    • set easa.jsf.remote=true
  • in <SERVERDATA>\jsf-easa\admin\config\context.properties
    • set excel.provider=local

The example above will use the most recently published version of the EASAP.

Once the two files above have been modified, restart the EASA Server.

Fewer Free Processes will appear at EASA→Administrator→Configure→Compute Servers under Excel Servers.

Other operational properties of the preloader may be adjusted (below), though in most cases the default settings are fine.

The preloader dynamically decides if there are enough free Excel processes to allocate one to preload an EASAP.

• percentage.of.free.excel.processes.to.be.used.for.preloader=30 (by default)

The above setting allows 30% of the number of free Excel threads at a particular time be allocated to preloading EASAP's.

This setting is dynamic.

• To see this consider a case where
  • the number of simultaneous EASAP Users increases.
  • since the number of maximum Excel processes is a fixed number,
  • the number of free Excel processes will decrease.
  • → in response to this scarcity, fewer Excel threads will be allocated to preloading EASAP's