Performance means different things to different people. For some, it translates to transaction response time, while others view it as the volume of work that can be processed within a given time period. In order to maximize performance, you will need to monitor, analyze, and tune all of the components that make up your application and infrastructure.

Performance of your SOA composites can be directly impacted by the design and implementation of the SOA code itself, the setting and configuration of the service infrastructure, or performance of external resources such as services or queues. Where do you begin to identify the performance bottleneck?

Fortunately, Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides a single tool that you require to capture key information such as WebLogic Server performance statistics and composite performance details. The following screenshot highlights the capturing of performance snapshots by using Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control:

It is also important to understand that performance tuning is an iterative process. You need to make the adjustments, measure the impact, and then perform an analysis before possibly making further adjustments, and so on. Due to the varying expectations of a performant system, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that works well in every environment. Improving performance is a process of learning and testing.

Chapter 4, Tuning Oracle SOA Suite 11g for Optimum Performance provides detail on how to tune the performance of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g service infrastructure. It will describe the various knobs that you can adjust, and when and how you might want to adjust them. It is not unusual to obtain considerable performance gains by implementing certain settings or applying specific configurations. Though tuning the service infrastructure is not the only area that impacts performance, it is undoubtedly a key area.