Guidelines for activating a Performance trace

This article answers the following queries :

What are the guidelines to be followed for activating a performance trace ?

 

 Guidelines for activating a Performance trace

 

1. If you are tracing a particular activity of a user, please make sure that the particular user is not performing any other activity in the system. Otherwise trace file will be difficult to analyze. For reasons of simplicity, please request user to perform only one activity while the trace is activated.

 

2. Please make sure that no background jobs or update processes are running in that SAP for  that particular user whose activity is being traced. Otherwise trace won’t be clear

3. By default, SQL trace is selected in ST05 transaction. Incase you would like to trace others( like RFC trace, buffer trace)  please activate them also.

4. Normally we are interested in the buffer load processes that get recorded while tracing an activity through SQL trace. Therefore, it is suggested to execute the program or activity that is to be traced once before actually tracing it so that all the buffer loads processes will happen. In the next run, since buffers were already loaded SQL trace doesn’t capture un-necessary details related to buffer load which makes it easy to analyze the trace.

5. In cases of distributed SAP system, where there are number of application servers  then you need to activate the trace in the particular application server where the user is performing the activity. In other words, trace won’t get recorded if you activate trace in one application server and user is performing the activity in another application server.

6. If you would like to record a trace for background job or for an update request in a distributed SAP system, it is suggested to activate the trace in all the application servers that are present in the SAP system. This is required because you will never know to which application server the particular request goes for execution.

If you are tracing an activity of any other user you can look at following monitors during the trace :

• Workprocesses overview (SM50/SM66)
• Operating system monitor of Database server to identity any CPU bottlenecks in database server)
• Database process monitor for monitoring the execution of SQL statements

Profile parameter settings for Performance Trace (ST05):

Please note that trace cannot be taken for very long duration as the size of the trace file is limited as set by SAP profile parameter. When the trace file is full, the oldest entries are deleted or overwritten by the newest entries i.e. writing to the trace file is cyclical.

The SAP profile parameter rstr/max_diskspace is used to set the size of the trace file in a SAP system. The default trace file size is 16MB

For a trace file, default file name also can be set using the SAP profile parameter rstr/file.

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