Improving startup time of HCL Commerce ts-app pod

Ts-app (transactional server) container is the heart of an HCL Commerce installation, it contains core transactional logic responsible for marketing, user management, price calculations, cart & order management. The less time it takes to start the better, especially if you deploy often or relay on autoscaling capabilities of a Kubernetes cluster to adjust number of pods to the current workloads.

Startup of the Ts-app container can be divided into 2 phases: configuration and server startup. HCL recently (in 9.1.13 release) significantly reduced the time required to complete the configuration phase. Our tests performed with 9.1.14 version of transaction server container show that with the improvement in place the configuration phase is reduced from just above 1 minute to around 25 seconds.

The setting called is not however turned on by default and has to be enabled using the container’s TX_QUICK_START environmental variable (more details in Starting the Transaction server Docker container by retrieving parameters from Vault (hcltechsw.com)).

There are other factors that can impact ts-app pod startup and optimization strategies that can address them. If you ts-app container is slow please let us know.