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Content Manager hardware requirements

Check the hardware requirements.

Hardware
The performance of Content Manager depends primarily on the CPU power and the I/O characteristics of the hardware. High CPU power is needed to allow the system to make calculations on-the-fly, e.g. for publishing. The I/O performance largely influences the system’s speed to gather and assemble information from the database to serve user requests. Content Manager imposes no specific requirements for data storage, as it holds generic versions that become specific versions by calculation on a user's request.

The hardware required for a specific Content Manager implementation depends on the specific requirements and settings of the project (for example, the number of concurrent users). The exact definition of the hardware requirements is typically done at the beginning of the project.

Database

The database server may be on any platform supported by the database vendor. Hardware and platform requirements for the database server should be obtained from the database vendor. The specifications supplied by Content Manager should be checked against the specifications supplied by the database vendor for the current hardware on which it is installed.

An example Microsoft Windows server machine could minimally have the following specifications:
  • CPU: dual core contemporary CPU
  • Internal Memory: 8 GB RAM
Database storage demands must account for the following:
  • All XML content and related metadata.
  • All images.
  • Published output (e.g. PDF, CHM...).

As a rule of thumb, multiply the size of all images by 3 to get an estimate of the starting size for your database. A normal documentation project can use 100 GB for its storage needs for about 2 to 3 years.

Web and Application layer

The server can be on a single system. However, for performance reasons it is advised to scale and have redundancy over multiple servers. The scaling introduction included in Tridion Docs documentation helps you determine the setup. Due to the many setup variations, you may want to contact the support team to discuss your specifics.

Minimum server configuration: A recent quad core system(s) containing 8 GB of RAM or more. Virtualized environments are supported if they are guaranteed to behave like a Windows OS installed on a physical machine. If performance is or becomes an issue, you are advised to use physical servers.

Storage demands: The consumers of storage are the actual installed Content Manager software components, the full-text-index collection, exported, and published content. Considering a normal documentation project, with an initial database reservation of 100 GB, the server should have at least 50 GB storage capacity. The typical setup is two servers, one handling the synchronous operations and one server handling the asynchronous/background operations. Initially you can start with one server handling all operations; we then suggest a dual CPU server. A second server can be added quite easily afterwards if load needs to be reduced on the primary server.

Client requirements

Client machines running desktop applications such as Publication Manager should have at least a 2.0 GHz CPU and 4 GB RAM.

Network requirements

Due to its stateless model, Content Manager passes large quantities of data. A 10 Mbit network connection provides a more than acceptable throughput.