Making the most of Re-factoring in FP2007 - Part 2

In my first blog post on re-factoring I mentioned the way to maximize the footprint savings was to re- create your configuration from scratch with FP 2007 installed on your database. However, this way not be practical for some people in terms of time and effort and they are willing to trade less of a footprint savings for less work to optimize their configuration.

I listed in the previous blog post the components that were re-factored. The first step in reducing footprint is to upgrade your SP2 configuration to FP2007, and then simply delete these re-factored components from your configuration if you know that you do not specifically need them (i.e. you did not specifically add them to your configuration when you first created them, but rather they were bought in by a dependency check). To illustrate the process I am going to use the Internet Explorer component as an example of a re-factored component in my runtime. I have built a Winlogon Sample macro configuration in SP2 and added Outlook Express to it, then run satisfied all dependencies. You can see that Internet Explorer has been brought into the runtime by the dependency check, and that Target Designer estimates the footprint to be 92689 KB/128736 KB (roughly 90MB/125MB).

Now, after installing FP2007 I upgrade that slx, and delete Internet Explorer from it. After running a dependency check you can see that one or more Primitive components have been added, but that IE is no longer brought into the runtime. The footprint estimate is also somewhat lower - 89579 KB/124416 KB (roughly 87MB/121MB).

This may be an adequate savings for some customers, but for those customers who want to dig a little deeper to further reduce footprint we can start walking down the dependency chain of the IE component. Just because IE was deleted from the configuration does not mean that any of dependencies it originally brought in (in SP2) are also removed. This chain of dependencies can be where the real footprint hit is noticeable. Admittedly it is not very intuitive in Target Designer to identify a component's dependencies, however there are a few ways of tackling this task.

  1. One way is to add the the component to a blank configuration, turn off auto-resolve dependencies (Tools > Options > Dependency Check > uncheck "auto-resolve dependencies") and run a dependency check. The task pane at the bottom of TD will show you the first level of dependencies that IE has. NOTE: This should be done on an SP2 database in order to identify the original dependencies that IE brought into your original SP2 configuration).
  2. Secondly, you can XPeCMD to list out the dependencies of the SP2 version of the IE component (all versions of a component reside in your database, but only the most recent vesion in visible in Target Designer). Using XPeCMD we can view all versions of the component, and their properties and dependencies. To do this, use XPeCMD to open a connection to your database, find all versions of IE, then selct the SP2 version and view its dependencies. The syntax is as follows:
  •  dbopen <servername>
  •  deptree /2 'comp:^Internet Explorer|R2890' (the |Rxxxx after the component name indicates the specific version of the component you want to view - in this case the SP2 version, 2890)

                         

The output from XPeCMD shows that the SP2 version of IE has a number of first-level dependencies. I can now go back and delete all of these first level dependency components from my Winlogon + OE config. After running a check dependency again (to verify that no other component in FP2007 requires any of the components I just deleted) the footprint estimate is now 84850KB/117848KB (roughly 83MB/115MB).

If more footprint savings is required you an walk through the next level of dependencies (i.e the dependencies brought in by the first level dependency components) as far down the chain as you wish to go. Naturally, the further down the chain you go the more effort is involved, until you may come a point where it would be just as easy to rebuild the config from scratch in FP2007.

As a final comparison, I rebuilt my Winlogon + OE config from scratch using FP2007- the size in TD is 77613 KB/107796 KB (roughly 76MB/105MB). You can see it quite a bit smaller than the SP2 configuration.

NOTE: I neglected to mention in my first blog article that Help & Support Services was also re-factored into 2 comps- HSS and Help Center & Support.

- Lynda