Sizing recommendations for the Contrast application
The CPU and memory resources for Contrast can vary based on the number of agents connected and application traffic communicating back to the Contrast application. The recommendations on this page apply to the application service.
Additional factors that impact performance include:
Web traffic from consumers of Contrast reporting data.
Contrast is a highly transactional system that presents calculated and real-time data sets back to consumers of the data. The more users interface with the system, the greater the demand for computing and memory.
Large amounts of data maintained in the application over extended periods of time.
You can proactively purge data over time or choose to keep the data. With any transactional system, the larger the data set to query against, the greater the computing requirements.
More than 100 connected agents
If you plan to use more than 100 connected agents, use a distributed configuration. Without a distributed configuration for this situation, you are likely to experience performance issues.
Use these guidelines to choose the appropriate mix of resources to scale the requirements to your workload:
Small workload: A small workload is about three to 30 agents communicating to Contrast, and about five to to 25 web traffic end users who access the system multiple times a day and actively use alerts, reports and integrations.
The greater the number of connected agents, the greater the memory requirements are for Contrast to handle in-flight traces. Storage depends on the life of trace data and the preservation of log files by system administrators.
vCPUs
Clock speed
RAM
Storage
~4 to ~8
2.5 GHz to 3.3 GHz
16 GB to 24 GB
100 GB to 200 GB
Large workload: A large workload is about 30 to 100 agents communicating to Contrast, and more than 25 web traffic users for full-scale enterprise deployments. End users access the system multiple times of day, and actively engage in Contrast features such as alerts, reports and integrations.
The greater the number of connected agents and end users, the greater the memory requirements for Contrast to handle in-flight traces. Storage depends on the life of trace data and the preservation of log files by system administrators.
vCPUs
Clock speed
RAM
Storage
~8 to ~16
2.5 GHz to 3.3 GHz
24 GB to 48 GB
200 GB to 500 GB
Important
Regardless of your workload size, allocate at least 16 GB of RAM to the Contrast application.
Tip
Follow the large workload guidelines if you are using the Contrast REST API architecture for automation or data extraction purposes and for continuous integration of agents with large automated regression suites.