SmartTarget Performance Factors?

Question

When I describe Functional Requirements for SmartTarget (ST), I gather:

• Triggers (for ADF Claims)
• Possible/known Trigger values
• ST Regions
• Expectations for ST Promotions (quantity)

I'll also suggest Custom Footprints to give Experience Manager users the ability to test the ST Promotions.

Could someone help me understand how these impact performance?

1. Triggers? Is there a practical range for number of Triggers? Can claims be in the 10s, 100s, or more?
2. Trigger values? Do the number or type of Trigger values matter?
3. Regions? Is it a good idea to re-use ST Regions across pages? Could having too many regions impact performance in delivery?

Finally, would the quantity of promotions matter in delivery (or even in the SmartTarget slide-out navigation pane?)

I suspect "practical" quantities business users can manage are a good design constraint/consideration, but what to better understand the performance impact.

Answer 1

It's not an easy question to answer. In general, I would say that you will run into usability issues with the volumes long before you run into performance issues.

The one possible exception might be the claims, since they are in memory on your web server. So you'll want to be a little thoughtful about the amount of data that you put in claims. But if you stick to the norm and have small pieces of data, I doubt you will have any issues.

Regions are only really stored as trigger values. I am not aware of any performance issues with the number of triggers or their values.

I have tested the system with thousands of Promotions without any issues -- except I wouldn't want to actually have to manage that many. So again, it comes down to what your users will actually be able to cope with.

In that regard, you should have as few of each of those items you mentioned as you can while still remaining flexible and somewhat future-proof for your users. They shouldn't have to get an implementer to change stuff in order to create the Promotions they need -- but they also shouldn't have to select between hundreds of variables and create a ton of Promotions when one will suffice.