Professional Apache Tomcat 6

Chapter 21. Performance Tuning

The previous chapter ended with a section called "What to Do After Performance Testing." It advised you to first analyze the root cause of poor performance before attempting a fix. This chapter covers some of those steps in more detail.

• First, we discuss general best practices for approaching a performance tuning project, such as setting up a test bed, establishing a performance baseline, making incremental changes for tuning performance, and measuring performance changes, if any, against this baseline.

• Next, we suggest where to look for performance bottlenecks, and how to identify the root cause when faced with specific Tomcat issues.

• Finally, we list design and development choices, and configuration options that affect performance in Web applications in general, and Tomcat-hosted applications in particular. Some of these tips might be common knowledge among Web developers, and others are mentioned elsewhere in the book. This section collects these tips in one place.

Performance tuning is a complex area, and the factors that affect performance are sometimes outside the application itself. These factors may include the network configuration and hardware platform characteristics, the operating system settings, Java virtual machine parameters, database tuning parameters, and finally the architecture of the Web application itself. Naturally, everything that affects performance cannot be covered here. The objective of this chapter is twofold: first to give ...