Sitecore Experience Analytics Cache Tuning

April 29, 2016
1 min read
sitecore

Sitecore 8 and xDB sees the introduction of the Experience Analytics dashboard. To increase the performance of the dashboard, there are a number of cache settings that can be configured within the configuration include file App_Config\Include\ExperienceAnalytics\Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.WebAPI.config.

Categories of Data

To generate the graphs shown within the dashboard, Experience Analytics calls a WebAPI endpoint with a number of parameters. The value of the dateTo parameter categorises the data into the following categories:

  • Safe - dateTo parameter is greater than 72 hours ago
  • Risky - dateTo parameter is greater than 3 hours ago but not safe.
  • Live - dateTo parameter is within the last 3 hours

Server Side Cache Settings

Depending on the category of the request, the cache expiration interval is retrieved from the following configuration settings:

  • Safe - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ServerSideSafeRequestCacheExpiration
  • Risky - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ServerSideRiskyRequestCacheExpiration
  • Live - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.CacheExpiration

Client Side Caching

Additionally, Experience Analytics uses client side caching which can be configured using the following settings:

  • Safe - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ClientSideSafeRequestCacheExpiration
  • Risky - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ClientSideRiskyRequestCacheExpiration
  • Live - ExperienceAnalytics.Api.CacheExpiration

Internal Cache

The last setting that can be configured is ExperienceAnalytics.InternalCacheExpiration. This configures the internal Analytics definitions cache (e.g. segments, dimensions and sites).

If any of the settings above are set to 0, then the default values will be used rather than setting the cache expiry to 0.

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