Estimate the Bandwidth used by EPM 2007 (part 1)

  • Article

I recently did a study to evaluate the bandwidth requirements for an outsourced EPM 2007 deployment.

The Tool Fiddler was used to measure the http traffic (https://www.fiddlertool.com).

The bandwidth is hard to estimate with EPM because the amount of data transferred depends of the customization done with the default product:

  • Data displayed is dynamic and depends on the profile of the user
  • The security of the user changes the amount of data shown, a typical user only sees the data he has permission to see
  • The amount of data displayed in views depends of the selected fields

The measures were done with an administrator account, so that it gives a maximum value.

Typical usage and measure:

Project Web Access operations:

  • With an empty IE cache
  • Then using the cache

Project Professional:

  • Initial opening with an empty cache
  • Full Save
  • Incremental Save (10 % of full size)

Reporting (using Reporting Services)

  • Reports displayed in HTML

The users are distributed around the world

Geography and Peak usage

Time Zone

PWA

 Pro Reporting
EMEA (40%) GMT+1 2000 300 200
US (40%) GMT-6 2000 300 200
Asia/Pacific (20%) GMT+7 1000 150 100
Total Enterprise   5000 750 500

Results
This is just an example of measure, and it cannot be generalized. It depends on the size of projects and the reports.

bandwidthExample