Jboss 5 Performance Tuning

Best practices for performance tuning JBoss enterprIse applIcatIon platform 5

tIps and trIcks for optImIzIng your applIcatIon’s performance

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In search of hIgh-performance applIcatIons performance tunIng prIncIples 2 2 3 Why tune for performance? Performance priorities A word about performance benchmarks

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JBoss eap 5.0 tunIng 5 6 9 9 Connection pooling Thread pooling LoggingCaching

8 Object and component pools

11 JBoss EAP performance tuning summary 11 Linux-specific tuning: Large memory pages 12 inux-specific tuning: Tuning the virtual L memory manager 12 Database tuning update 12 Case study 17 applIcatIon performance tunIng: a contInuous process 18 appendIx: usIng large-page memory (lInux-specIfIc InstructIons)

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Best practices forperformance tuning JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0

in search of high-performance applications
Overall, performance tuning is a very important part of creating, maintaining, and deploying a successful business application. Whether you are building custom applications or deploying commercial, off-the-shelf solutions, you will likely need to tune the application, the database, themiddleware, or all three. In fact, 75% of performance issues originate with the application itself. When organizations select application middleware, performance is always one of their most important selection criteria, if not the most important. In many cases our customers tell us they chose JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) because of its superior performance. They know that many users ofJBoss EAP are achieving superior application performance day after day. To get the most from your company’s investment in middleware, developers and architects need to know the specific ways they can achieve superior performance with JBoss EAP. While we would all like to think that an application could perform well straight out of the box, this is not usually the case. Applications can havewidely varying characteristics, and while some applications might perform well with default middleware settings, others will not. If you are new to JBoss EAP or performance tuning, this paper will introduce you to best practices that can help you avoid common performance pitfalls as you prepare your application for production. If you’re an old hand at application performance issues, you know thattechnology is constantly changing. You may benefit from an update on best practices in JBoss EAP performance tuning.

performance tuning principles
Why tune for performance? Performance was once considered just another feature of an application. Today it is frequently considered the most important characteristic of the application — one that can have a significant impact on your business andyour productivity. Consider your reaction to a slow website. If you’re like most people, you become frustrated, lose patience, and go elsewhere. If that company is counting on revenue from Web sales, it has not only lost your attention — it has lost business. Even for internal applications, poor performance can affect productivity if users have to wait or deal with unpredictable behavior. Atbest, they might feel annoyed, lose a little time, or form a negative opinion of their IT departments. At worst, business transactions may be lost, or customers may go without important service if users must work around a poorly performing application. But user experience is not the only reason to tune for performance. A well-performing application will generally use fewer hardware and softwareresources. A company can optimize its investment in hardware when applications are tuned appropriately, whether that means using older systems longer, purchasing new systems that are more modestly sized, or using fewer systems overall. On the software side, a wellperforming application will generally need to use fewer CPU counts or software licenses, no matter what type of software is...