JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning

Table of Contents

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Performance Tuning Concepts
• Preface
• What you will get from this book?
• What is performance?
• Scalability: the other side of performance
• The tuning process
• Tuning in the software development cycle
• Building the performance test
• Establish a baseline
• Collect data
• Analyze data
• Configure and test again
• Tuning Java Enterprise applications
• Areas of tuning
• Summary

• Chapter 2: Installing the Tools for Tuning
• Welcome to scientific tuning
• The rationale behind the choice of the tools
• Profiling the Java Virtual Machine
• Installing the JVM
• Installing VisualVM
• Connecting to a local server
• Connecting to a remote server
• Monitoring your server
• The Monitor tab
• The Threads tab
• The Profiler tab
• Collecting snapshots
• Extending VisualVM
• Profiling your applications with Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) Project
• Installing the TPTP suite
• Updating Eclipse
• How to profile an application
• Going beyond the basics of TPTP
• Load testing your application with JMeter
• Building a Test Plan
• Step 1: Create a Thread Group
• Step 2: Create a Sampler
• Step 3: Create a Listener
• Making your test plan a bit more realistic
• How to create a complex Test Plan
• Running JMeter as a shell
• Operating system tools and commands
• Windows users
• Unix users
• Dealing with low CPU utilization
• Dealing with high CPU utilization
• Dealing with high resource contention
• Dealing with high disk utilization
• Summary

• Chapter 3: Tuning the Java Virtual Machine
• The starting point
• Choosing the JVM settings
• Setting the correct heap size
• The correct amount of memory to grant your application
• I cannot allocate enough memory for the JVM!
• Where do I configure JVM settings in JBoss AS?
• Sizing the garbage collector generations
• Which is the correct ratio between the young and old generations?
• The garbage collector algorithms
• Choosing the right garbage collector for your application
• The G1 garbage collector
• Debugging garbage collection
• Making good use of the memory
• Avoid creating large Java objects
• Handling 'Out of Memory' errors
• Finding the memory leak in your code
• A practical example
• Application description
• Setting up a test bed
• Benchmark aftermath
• Summary

• Chapter 4: Tuning the JBoss AS
• From release 4.x to 5.x, and on
• Comparing server releases
• Creating a custom application server configuration
• JBoss AS pools
• The System thread pool
• Finding out if the System thread pool is a bottleneck
• JDBC connection pool
• Calculating the optimal min-pool-size and max-pool-size
• Using Prepared Statements efficiently
• Detecting connection leaks
• Should you reuse connections or acquire new onesfrom the pool?
• Logging for performance
• Choosing the best logging strategy
• Which is the fastest appender?
• Should I use the AsyncAppender to improve my log throughput?
• Which layout should I choose for my logs?
• Is it enough to increase the log threshold to get rid of log charge?
• How does logging hierarchy influence performance?
• Summary

• Chapter 5: Tuning the Middleware Services
• Introduction to Enterprise Java Beans
• Session Beans
• How to configure the optimal size for stateless pool?
• How to configure the optimal size of stateful cache?
• Comparing SLSBs and SFSBs performance
• Session Beans and Transactions
• Introduction to the Java Messaging system
• Entering the JBoss Messaging system
• Tuning JBoss JMS provider
• Tuning JBoss Messaging (JBoss AS 5.x)
• Tuning HornetQ (JBoss AS 6.x)
• Basic JMS tuning
• An example use case with HornetQ
• Summary

• Chapter 6: Tuning the Persistence Layer
• Designing a good database
• Reducing the space needed by your database
• Partitioning the database
• Using indexes
• Tuning JDBC
• Using a Connection Pool
• Setting the proper fetch size
• Use batch updates for bulk insert/updates
• Use Prepared Statements instead of Statements
• Tuning JDBC networking
• Tuning Hibernate and JPA
• Optimizing object retrieval
• Limiting the amount of data fetched with pages
• Fetching parent and child items with a single query
• Speeding up your Hibernate queries with batches
• Using named queries to speed up your queries
• Improving the performance of bulk SQL statements
• Evaluating using caches to speed up your queries
• Hibernate caches
• The first-level cache
• The second-level cache
• Configuring the second-level cache on JBoss AS
• The query cache
• Entity cache versus query cache
• Optimizing data synchronization
• A sample use case
• Summary

• Chapter 7: JBoss AS Cluster Tuning
• Introduction to JBoss clustering
• Configuring JGroups transport
• How to optimize the UDP transport configuration
• How to optimize the JGroups' Protocol stack
• Tuning JBoss Cache
• Understanding JBoss Cache configuration
• Configuring cacheMode
• Configuring cache concurrency
• Tuning session replication
• Override SFSB's isModified method
• Use buddy replication
• Advanced buddy replication
• Buddy replication and session affinity
• Configure replication granularity and replication trigger
• How to configure the replication-trigger
• How to configure the replication-granularity
• Tuning cache storage
• Where does cache data get stored?
• Summary

• Chapter 8: Tomcat Web Server Tuning
• JBoss Web server basics
• Configuring Connectors for optimal performance
• How do you calculate the threads for your application?
• The long life of Web threads
• Is there a maximum amount of connections the Web server can handle?
• Using Apache Portable Runtime
• Integrating JBoss Web server with Apache Web server
• Load testing Apache-JBoss connectivity
• mod_cluster to the rescue?
• Last tips before rolling JBoss Web server in production
• Summary

• Chapter 9: Tuning Web Applications on JBoss AS
• Choosing a framework for your web applications
• Comparing framework performance
• The performance of tabular data
• The performance of rich tree
• Increasing the performance of JSF and RichFaces
• Configuring JSF state saving efficiently
• Using Ajax to speed up your JSF applications
• Speeding up CSS and JavaScript file loading
• Tuning web services
• Performance of web services
• Elements influencing the performance of web services
• Reducing the size of SOAP messages
• Faster JBossWS provider
• Summary

• Appendix: A Tuned Mind

• Index