WebSphere Tuning Approach
IBM Websphere Application Server is the leading software foundation especially for service oriented architecture (SOA) services and applications of your business. You can build business critical enterprise solutions and provide innovative functionality with Websphere Application Server (WAS). The WAS family supports a wide range of products and assists you in developing and serving all the relevant applications. Customers can utilize these products to create and manage dynamic websites and other complex applications effectively. Let’s proceed with WebSphere tuning approach.
Websphere Application Server provides the environment to run your applications and to integrate them with any sort of system or platform. The major component in Websphere Application Server is the server runtime environment. An application server offers the necessary infrastructure for executing your enterprise applications.
Performance Considerations
We need to keep in mind that ~80% of the tuning is made on the application, middleware, and database layers. The remaining ~20% tunes the hardware and operating system layer.
Performance is one of the major requirements of every WAS environment. Performance must be tracked on a regular basis while implementing your project. A real performance run campaign is necessary before switching your new environment to the production. This is helpful in determining whether your infrastructure is well sized.
When a system is rolled out, many users are prepared for small functional issues but performance issues are not always acceptable. Performance issues may affect all the stakeholders working on the project. So you nee to perform the necessary load tests that symbolize a realistic user load against your system.
The performance demands should be measurable for proper evaluation. You need to establish success criteria to evaluate your scaling tasks.
Here are the Targets:
Throughput
The Throughput gives the total number of requests in a period that could be processed by the system. For instance, if an application has the ability to handle at least 25 simultaneous client requests and each request consumes one second, this application has a potential throughput of 25 requests per second.
Response time
The time from entering a system at a specific entry point until exiting the system at an exit point is known as response time. In a WAS environment, this is measured as usually the time taken for the request submitted by a browser until the response is received.
Batch style applications – Maximum time frame
Batch applications often execute during a time frame, most probably at night to take the advantage of low peak hours and to avoid application customers during the day. Another important criteria for batch applications is to utilize all the resources.
WebSphere Tuning Approach
Infrastructure tuning is an iterative process and involves optimizations in all the layers of environment. At first, you need to run your performance tests and later compare it with the requirements.
If the performance meets your objectives, ensure that you have planned effectively for your future growth and you are able to meet all the performance goals. Then you need to document all your findings in a performance tuning report and archive it. Just include the changed settings
to reach your objectives. To properly analyze the performance, collect the details such as logging and tracing.
The above figure summarizes the performance testing approach.
As per your analysis, you can locate the bottleneck and apply the changes. For instance, the solution would be to include more resources such as memory or processor. Later, you have to run the performance tests again and redo the same until all your requirements are met. This process will help you resolve all your major bottlenecks.
After finishing your performance campaign, you can make the required changes and update your production environment.