SAP HANA Performance tuning isn’t optional. It’s needed for a BASIS admin. It ensures that performance remains optimized, fast, and swift across the board. This automatically increases the benefits of the R/3 system. It also reduces repair and ownership costs. You won’t need to update your system nearly as much if you follow these tweaks. Sure, they may require additional work on your part, but the payoff is worth it.

SAP HANA Optimization Guidelines

These are a few guidelines that you should adhere to when making optimization changes. Remember, you don’t want to optimize the program at the cost of taking away key performance advantages. A proper channel needs to be followed if you are making tweaks and optimizations for SAP HANA.

Analysis

You need to analyze your system very carefully to make changes in key areas. First, identify the areas of the R/3 system that need to be optimized. These should be areas where performance problems are common and recurring. The changes should be restricted to these areas. Also, it’s useful to record the analysis data. This way, you’ll be able to track all the moves you’ve made if anything isn’t working the way you’d hoped.

Prerequisites for Analysis

Performance analysis improves significantly with the latest SAP HANA patch levels. Hence, you should have a recent one in place. All the SAP HANA parameters should be based on SAP recommendations. This ensures all the important monitoring features are enabled including the thread sample details and the expensive statement trace.

Don’t Make Changes without Proper Analysis

Remember, change as much as necessary, but change as little as possible. Without having identified any of the performance glitches and issues, you shouldn’t go with your gut and optimize blindly. Change suggestions should only be implemented with analysis and verification.

Verification

Once you’ve made all the changes, you can perform further analysis. If the changes have provided the desired results, you can mark them verified. Keeping a record of your data will help track the changes for future verification.

Small Steps

Tuning implies that you do the right amount. Just like how turning a radio knob a little makes the reception better, but too much makes it worse. Hence, you shouldn’t make too many changes at once, lest they conflict with each other.

There’s an Exception to Every Rule

You may require a different approach in certain areas. Despite taking precautions, some recommendations may yield negative results. Hence, you should verify the changes and follow these guidelines for every change.

Identifying SAP HANA Response Time Issues

Identifying Performance Issues Related to SAP HANA

It’s common to think SAP HANA is to blame if performance issues occur after migration. However, this is an inaccurate assumption.

The issues may be due to an SAP kernel or network latency issues. You should first identify the portion of time spent on the SAP HANA server-side and the application side. Investigations into SAP HANA are useful if the server-side is responsible for a big chunk of response time.

Identifying a Response Time Issue

Identifying where most of the time is lost is crucial. On the SAP HANAL server-side, the issue is identifiable on:

• THREAD STATE (LOCK_WAIT_NAME in case of locks)
• Info in views M_SERVIC_THREADS and M_SERVICE_THREAD_SAMPLES

Basis Tuning Tasks

1. Optimize System Parameters

You need to optimize for these 3 basic parameters:

• R3 Parameters (like memory management)
• Database Parameters (like database buffer sizes)
• Operating System and Network Parameters

2. Optimize Database Disk Layout by balancing I/O

3. Optimization of Workload Distribution

• The number of work processes, log-on groups, and background scheduling

4. Detect Hardware Bottlenecks to Verify Hardware Sizing

Common Performance Issues with SAP Software

1 Your system may be slow in general due to issues with the CPU and memory, I/O or table locks. To solve this you can use the HANA SQL script “HANA_Configuration_MiniChecks” from KBA 1969700. This will allow you to check the recommended notes on this issue.

2. Transactions may become slow after migration to HANA DB for ECC or Suite on the HANA system. TO solve this, ensure that you’re using the HANA optimized transactions. Also check if the app switches are enabled per this document: SoH_Optimizations_2014_10_24.pdf. The document will be attached to the note 1761546 – SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA – Optimizations.
3. DB custom transactions or ABAP custom programs may run slower than usual after migration to HANA. This will likely be due to problems specific to SAP transactions or programs on the application server.
4. For X type statements which are causing performance issues, you can look at note 2238679 – SAP HANA DB: High CPU consumption caused by UnifiedTable::MVCCObject::generateOLAPBitmapMVCC
5. For poor performance when calculating views after a HANA upgrade, you can refer to the following notes for optimization tweaks:

• 2441054 – High query compilation times and absence of plan cache entries for queries against calculation views
• 2291812 – SAP HANA DB: Disable/Enable CalculationEngine Feature – CalcView Unfolding

While these are by no means all the SAP performance tweaks you can use, you can use them as a springboard. It will help to start here and move on to more advanced optimizations. SAP tuning will not only help to make your workflow faster, but it will help reduce operational costs.

Whether you run a business or are dabbling in SAP as an individual, it will help to implement these tweaks. Your system will not only perform better, but you will be able to weed out performance issues in the future by following these guidelines.