Eric Anderson
Macromedia, Inc.
The Moment of Truth: Tuning Performance in JRun Apps and Environment
We've all been there when an application goes live, and no one knows what kind of load it will handle. The principal developer checked the final application enhancements and bug fixes into the source control system. The Quality Assurance (QA) team tested and verified that all application features worked properly. Even the system administrator has built the production server and prepared it to go-live.
The confidence of a job well done has the project manager slapping members of the engineering team on the back, congratulating them. Indeed, the exuberance catches the whole team. Suddenly, the director of software development sends the CIO an email saying this latest release is the, "highest quality release of software in the history of the company." Then, you get a phone call from the system administrator: "Your application is hung and I'm taking it off line."
Even experienced J2EE architects leave performance testing and analysis of server-side Java applications until the very end of development projects. This lack of attention to application performance can spell disaster. Measuring, evaluating, and tuning performance in a J2EE application is not magic. Teams developing J2EE applications can use the same software engineering and quality techniques that they apply to creating a feature-rich application to tuning a Java server environment.
This article explains how to design and deploy scalable J2EE applications that perform well. You can learn the recommended techniques for:
- Measuring server-side Java performance
- Examining common J2EE application enhancements that maximize performance
- Learning how to tune the JRun thread and object pooling features
- Learning the latest JVM and OS tuning tips and tricks
- Finding out what to do if you have performance problems in a production environment.
Table of Contents
- How to Measure Performance
- Using Performance Metrics for Scalability Planning
- Achieving Performance Goals Through Tuning
- Tuning Web Applications
- Tuning Enterprise Applications
- Tuning the Java Virtual Machine
- Tuning the JRun Thread Pool
- Conclusion
About the author
Eric is a principal engineer in the Macromedia Product Support organization. He's helped hundreds of customers around the world diagnose and correct Java performance problems. Currently he spends his time between his offices in Newton, Massachusetts and Tokyo.
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