How well does the Document Converter scale / deal with high load?

From time to time we are asked about how fast the Document Converter is, ’ how long does it take to convert a file’. Although we can make up an arbitrary metric, the real answer is ‘it depends’.

It depends on the number of cores in your server, the number of servers, the kind of documents you are converting, the complexity of the documents you are converting, the number of concurrent users etc. There simply is no proper and honest answer to this question. Having said that, you can find the results of a performance / scalability test here.

The Document Converter has been developed with scalability and concurrency in mind and ‘hundreds of transactions a minute’ is absolutely achievable, just not on a single core server while converting the King James Bible.

By default two parallel instances of each document type are allowed, but this can be changed using the config file. For details open the Administration Guide and search for ‘Concurrency’ (or see this KB Article).

To increase scalability further it is possible to add multiple conversion servers and group them under a single host name using a standard HTTP load balancer such as the free NLBS that ships with Windows Server.

For more details see:

• Performance metrics for the Muhimbi Document Converter.

• How does the Conversion Service deal with concurrency? (And how to tweak it).

• Document Converter for SharePoint Administration Guide.

• Document Converter Services Administration Guide.