Oracle SOA Suite 11g forms the basis of the SOA infrastructure for many organizations. While there is a wealth of information on administering SOA Suite applications already available, there is very little independent information available regarding performance tuning. With the chief goal of software and hardware vendors being to sell more licenses and hardware, the topic of getting the most from your existing investment often falls by the wayside. This book aims to address that by giving clear, concise, and simple recipes that will help you identify performance bottlenecks in your application, and then resolve them.
We work from the ground up, starting with how to identify common SOA Suite 11g performance problems and introducing the tools that you need, and working up the stack through JVM tuning and application server tuning, before covering the BPEL, BPMN, and mediator stacks. Finally, we have chapters on application design and deployment considerations.
Chapter 1, Identifying Problems, starts out by looking at some of the common performance problems that can occur in the Oracle SOA Suite applications, and how to identify them. We look at using a variety of tools to understand what is going on inside the JVM, and to identify the particular resource bottleneck that is causing poor performance.
Chapter 2, Monitoring Oracle SOA Suite, looks at how we can use the VFabric Hyperic tool from VMWare to monitor the performance of our SOA Suite infrastructure, and what metrics we should be keeping an eye on.
Chapter 3, Performance Testing, looks at using the Apache JMeter tool to solve performance problems, by triggering them.
Chapter 4, JVM Memory, starts right at the bottom of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g stack. We look at how JVM memory is allocated, and how you can increase and decrease the memory available to your application, as well as other JVM tuning tips. The low-level areas of Oracle SOA Suite are often overlooked, so we cover the basics of Java memory management in enough detail to give those unfamiliar with it sufficient background to understand what they need to be concerned about.
Chapter 5, JVM Garbage Collection Tuning, teaches us how the Java virtual machine garbage collector does a very complicated job, and that there are a number of ways of optimizing it for the kinds of payloads that Oracle SOA Suite 11g usually has to handle.
Chapter 6, Platform Tuning, looks at some of the tuning options available in the operating system and Oracle WebLogic server that can improve the performance of SOA Suite 11g applications.
Chapter 7, Datasources and JMS, covers tips related to JMS and Datasource tuning that can improve the performance of resource-intensive SOA Suite applications.
Chapter 8, BPEL and BPMN Engine Tuning, primarily focuses on how we can improve the performance of the engine itself, including database tuning recipes, and helps those who find that the bottleneck of their SOA Suite system is the BPEL or BPMN application itself.
Chapter 9, Mediator and BAM, focuses on tuning the Oracle SOA Suite Mediator, and also includes some information on tuning the BAM Adapter for SOA Suite application that connects to a BAM service.
Chapter 10, Rules and Human Workflow, focuses on tuning the rules and human-workflow components, and our recipes focus on how to reduce resource contention.
Chapter 11, SOA Application Design, focuses on design-time recipes that will be of more interest to architects. We also discuss how design-time decisions can have an impact on the performance of a SOA Suite application, and covers best practices for designing the key components.
Chapter 12, High Performance Configuration, takes a higher-level look at the Oracle SOA Suite-deployment architectures, focusing on how we can use cluster and load balance to scale our application out to meet performance requirements.
We obviously assume that you have an Oracle SOA Suite 11g application, and are looking to tune it. So we expect that you have the necessary software and licenses from Oracle. In addition to SOA Suite 11g from Oracle, which is used throughout the book, we also make use of the VFabric Hyperic HQ monitoring tool from VMWare, and the JMeter load-testing tool from Apache. Both Hyperic and JMeter are freely available from their respective vendors.
The target audience for this book are Oracle SOA Suite administrators of all levels of experience. Whether you normally administer databases and have had SOA Suite handed to you because it has Oracle in the name, or whether you have years of experience in SOA administration, we are sure you will find something useful in this book. While the primary audience are the administrators, there is plenty of useful information—to think about when designing applications—for application architects as well.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Batching_Limit_Lower determines the minimum number of messages in the batch."
A block of code is set as follows:
HugePages_Total: <number of pages> HugePages_Free: <number of pages> Hugepagesize: <page size, in kB>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd %MIDDLEWARE_HOME%/user_projects/domains/soa_domain/
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this:
"Set the property Metrics Level to Disabled."
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