Pinnacle Renewable Energy Group was founded in 1989 and its mission is to be the world’s largest and most reliable producer and supplier of bioenergy products. It operates six plants across British Columbia with a productive capacity of 1,050,000 tonnes of wood pellets annually, which comprises 56% of Canada’s total pellet production.
Challenge
Pinnacle Renewable Energy Group uses Primavera Contract Management and had set up a dedicated environment to gain the maximum performance for its user base. This was comprised of a Database Server and an Application Server configured specially to the needs of Primavera Contract Management.
However, they were faced with significant performance challenges where creating a Purchase Order in Primavera Contract Management and saving it would take over 5 minutes. After spending nearly two months going back and forth with Oracle support and still unable to improve the performance, the Pinnacle team reached out to Ten Six for answers.
Ten Six Approach
The Ten Six technical team first audited the entire environment and validated the installation of the database, Primavera Contract Management, WebLogic and any other necessary components. In addition, version numbers of all products were checked to make sure the environment was one that was supported by Oracle. The installation was a simple setup due to its dedicated nature, for example, the application server had only Primavera Contract Management installed on it and WebLogic only had one domain and that was Primavera Contract Management.
We then ran a series of tests to replicate the problem and identify the cause. The database server was showing no performance issues and disk latency was sub 2ms. It was becoming clear that the issue resided with WebLogic and after reviewing the code in the startWeblogic.cmd file the problem was identified. The issue was due to the repetitive lines of code in startWeblogic.cmd file as shown below.
The Ten Six technical consultant then modified the startWeblogic.cmd file to correct the issue as shown below.
Finally, we restarted the Primavera Contract Management services and logged in to the WebLogic Admin Console. We then deleted the Data Sources and then recreated them with the correct Driver type.
Results
The results were a huge reduction in the save time reducing it down to 2-3 seconds. The Pinnacle Renewable Energy team was thrilled with the performance improvements, turning a system that was previously unusable into a vital part of the organizations enterprise tool suite.
Not only was this performance issue resolved, it only took the Ten Six team 12 hours to identify and correct the problem with all work performed remotely.