Featured White Papers

• Why choose an Open Source BPM?
• 10 FAQs on Business Process Management
• Best Practices for Getting Started with BPM
• Free Your Devs From The Pain Of Java Redeploys
• Increase Velocity 40% by Using JRebel
• What Developers Want: The End of Application Redeploys
• Developer Productivity Report: Java Tools, Tech, Devs, and Data
• Coding with JRebel: Java Forever Changed
• Utilizing Fast Testing to Transform Java Development
• Do You Really Get Classloaders?
• Pragmatic Continuous Delivery with Jenkins, Nexus, and LiveRebel
• Your Next Java Web App: Less XML, No Long Restarts, Fewer Hassles
• Coding with JRebel, Java Forever Changed
• 2012 Developer Productivity Report: Java Tools, Tech, Devs, and Data

Sponsored Links

• APIs for Java Programmers: Manage & Convert DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF & More

• Instantly Preview Java Code Changes: JRebel.com

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

J2EE application performance optimization

How to extract maximum performance from your J2EE Web applications

By Rahul Kuchhal, JavaWorld.com, 05/17/04

In today's world of larger-then-ever software applications, users still expect real-time data and software that can process data at blazing speeds. With the advent of broadband access, users have grown accustomed to receiving responses in seconds, irrespective of how much data the server handles. It is becoming increasingly important for Web applications to provide as short response times as possible. The most obvious and simple way to improve a Website's performance is by scaling up hardware. But scaling the hardware does not work in all cases and is definitely not the most cost-effective approach. Other solutions can improve performance, without extra costs for the hardware. This article provides some suggestions that prove helpful when trying to maximize a J2EE Web application's performance.

If you decide to try this article's recommendations, keep in mind this article provides suggestions only. Performance tuning is as much an art as it is a science. Changes that often result in improvement might not make any difference in some cases, or, in rare scenarios, they can result in degradation. For best results with performance tuning, take a holistic approach.

Overview

Figure 1 illustrates at a broad level how a J2EE application appears when deployed in a production environment. To get the best performance from a J2EE application, all the underlying layers must be tuned, including the application itself.

For maximum performance, all the components in Figure 1—operating system, Web server, application server, and so on—need to be optimized. This article will give a glimpse into tuning a J2EE application server, Web server, relational database, and your J2EE application. For maximum payoff from this article, follow these guidelines:

• Set a goal: Before you begin tuning your J2EE application's performance, set a goal. Often this goal addresses the maximum concurrent users the application will support for a given limit on response times. But the goal can also focus on other variables—for example, the response times should not increase more than 10 percent during the peak hour of user load.
• Identify problem areas: It is important to identify the bottlenecks when you start making changes to improve performance. A little investigation into problems might reveal the specific component that causes poor performance. For example, if the CPU usage on an application server is high, you will want to focus on tuning the application server first.
• Follow a methodical and focused path: Once the goal is set, try to make changes that are expected to have the biggest impact on performance. Your time is better spent tuning a method that takes 10 seconds but gets called 100 times than tuning a method that takes one minute but gets called only once. In an ideal world, you test one change at a time before using it in a production environment. You make one change and stress-test it. If the change results in positive impact, only then will you make it permanent.

Identify bottlenecks

The goal of performance tuning is to identify bottlenecks and remove them. It is an iterative process. Once one area of the application improves, another area will become a bottleneck. You must repeat the cyclic process of first identifying the bottleneck, then resolving the bottleneck, then identifying the next bottleneck until the desired goal has been reached. You will need two kinds of tools that prove helpful in this process. First, you need stress tools that generate load for your application. Second, you need monitoring tools that collect data for various performance indicators.