CHAPTER 10 MANAGING REPORTS
We’ll also show you how to use rsconfig to join an SSRS server to a Web farm to see how offloading
resources to another system will enhance performance. The Reporting Services Configuration Manager
can also be used for this purpose.
We began by running a simulated load of 15 users, all executing a single report against RS05. We
quickly assessed the performance impact by monitoring the server with Task Manager. Fortunately,
when running the simulated load against our Reporting Services server, it didn’t take that high of a
performance hit. However, in some instances you may get results that max out the CPU. In those
instances, you are likely to find that the individual processes that are taxing the processor are SQL Server
and the ReportingServicesService.exe. Figure 10-28 shows spikes of our CPU usage jumping between 25
and 85percent as the test was running.
We knew our test SSRS server was a four processor system with more than 3GB of RAM. In the case
where your CPU usage is getting maxed out, this tells us that it is the CPU that is the bottleneck. Because
our production deployment of SSRS would not mirror the setup of RS05 (in other words, the production
server would be a high-end system with at least 32GB of RAM), we could take that into consideration.
However, one other factor would have a substantial impact on the difference in performance
between the production and test environments. In the test environment, the SSRS service and SQL
Server were on the same system, RS05. What if we configured the SSRS service to use a remote SQL
Server instance for its database? Any performance degradation caused by accessing the ReportServer
database over the network instead of a local database would be negligible if the CPU utilization
percentage dropped down to a more manageable number.Figure 10-28. Task Manager