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Planning for Tuning and Reporting (Part 1)

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POSTED BY: PETER OKONSKI, MSS Test Lead

There are many different articles and white papers that address basic capacity planning for Microsoft Speech Server. One example is the MSS planning white paper: Estimating Capacity for Speech-enabled Interactive Voice Response Solutions.However, if you plan to use the reporting and tuning capabilities provided in MSS 2007, you need to plan for additional servers and related storage.

Call Workload Definitions

How do you plan? Start by gathering call workload definitions such as number of calls per hour, average call duration in seconds, and percentage of time the line can be busy.

Application Type

Categorize your application into one of the following MSS 2007 application types: Simple (e.g. DTMF, digits); Average (e.g. date, spelling, menu); or Complex (e.g. 50,000 name recognition, stock trade).

Language(s)

In addition, when you consider that different languages generate different log file sizes, the language(s) your application supports can affect your capacity needs, particularly if you plan to store those log files for a long period of time.

Worksheet

The following table contains the MSS customer application details that you should consider when enabling reporting and tuning in MSS 2007:

Description

Example

Customer Value

Number of calls per hr – peak

5,000 calls/hr

Number of calls per hr – off peak

100 calls/hr

Time of main calls load per day

10 hrs/day

Average call duration (e.g. 100 sec)

100 sec

Percent line can be busy

1%

Load characteristic

  1. Flat distribution over a day
  2. Bell curve
  3. Peak type of daily distribution
  4. Weekdays main load
  5. Weekends load
  6. Every day the same

2

4-

Language(s) of the application

US-en

Application type:

  1. Simple (such as DTMF, digits)
  2. Average (such as date, spelling, menu)
  3. Complex (such as a 50,000 name recognition, stock trade)

1

Other details on workload and customer behavior

  1. Number of grammars
  2. Grammar size
  3. Prompt database size

1 = 1

2 = 15,000

3 = 50,000

In addition, if you plan to use the following servers in your deployment, you should figure that into your capacity planning calculations as well.

  • MSS Server
  • TIS Server (optional)
  • Web Server (optional)
  • SQL Server for reporting and tuning (optional)
  • Data Warehouse (optional)

The Microsoft Speech Server may generate files on each MSS server, Web server, and TIS server, if applicable. Because of the significant impact of the storage needed for the ETL files or any of the MSS databases, it is critical to enter time for collecting data in the file or database format.

 

Data collection needs can be gathered by using the following table. For definitions on these terms, refer to MSS 2007 Beta Help.

Notes

  • The default values are not the maximum supported number of days by the Microsoft Speech Server 2007.
  • You can use only one type of compression (e.g. Windows compression, ZIP, or Non) for the repository of the ETL files.

In my next posting, I’ll provide examples how to use this data and how to collect the runtime to predict the growth of Microsoft Speech Server systems.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2006
    Great stuff Peter.

    I'm hoping to put a more organized plan into place for tuning and reporting once we are up on 2007. Your information should prove most helpful.

    Perhaps we can meet up next week. It would be great to put a name with a face.