Book Image

JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning

Book Image

JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning

Overview of this book

Today's organizations need to deliver faster services to a large set of people and businesses. In order to survive this challenge, enterprises need to optimize the performance of their application server along with its components and hardware. Writing faster applications is no longer just an option for your products; it's an imperative requirement, which you cannot ignore. JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning will teach you how to deliver fast applications on the JBoss Application Server and Apache Tomcat, giving you a decisive competitive advantage over your competitors. You will learn how to optimize the hardware resources, meeting your application requirements with less expenditure.The performance of Java Enterprise applications is the sum of a set of components including the Java Virtual Machine configuration, the application server configuration (in our case, JBoss AS), the application code itself and ultimately the operating system. This book will show you how to apply the correct tuning methodology and use the tuning tools that will help you to monitor and address any performance issues. By looking more closely at the Java Virtual Machine, you will get a deeper understanding of what the available options are for your applications and how their performance will be affected. You will learn about thread pool tuning, EJB tuning, JMS tuning, Enterprise Java Beans, and the Java Messaging Service. The persistence layer and JBoss Clustering service each have a chapter dedicated to them as they are two of the most crucial elements to configure correctly in order to run a fast application. You will also learn how to tune your web server, enabling you to configure and develop web applications that get the most out of the embedded Tomcat web server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
A Tuned Mind
Index

The tuning process


At this point you will have grasped that performance tuning spans over several components, including the application delivered and the environment where it is running. However, we haven't addressed which is the right moment for starting to tune your applications. This is one of the most underestimated issues in software development and it is commonly solved by applying tuning only at two stages:

  • While coding your classes

  • At the end of software development

Tuning your applications as you code is a consolidated habit of software developers, at first because it's funny and satisfying to optimize your code and see an immediate improvement in the performance of a single function. However, the other side of the coin is that most of these optimizations are useless. Why? It is statistically proven that within one application only 10-15 % of the code is executed frequently, so trying to optimize code blindly at this stage will produce little or no benefit at all to your application.

The second favorite anti-pattern adopted by developers is starting the tuning process just at the end of the software development cycle. For good reason, this can be considered a bad habit. Firstly, your tuning session will be more complex and longer: you have to analyze again the whole application roundtrip while hunting for bottlenecks again. Supposing you are able to isolate the cause of the bottleneck, you still might be forced to modify critical sections of your code, which, at this stage, can turn easily into a nightmare.

Think, for example, of an application which uses a set of JSF components to render trees and tables. If you discover that your JSF library runs like a crawl when dealing with production data, you have very little you can do at this stage: either you rewrite the whole frontend or you find a new job.

So the moral of the story is: you cannot think of performance as a single step in the software development process; it needs to be a part of your overall software development plan. Achieving maximum performance from your software requires continued effort throughout all phases of development, not just coding. In the next section we will try to uncover how performance tuning fits in the overall software development cycle.

Tuning in the software development cycle

Having determined that tuning needs to be a part of the software development cycle, let's have a look at the software cycle with performance engineering integrated.

As you can see, the software process contains a set of activities (Analysis, Design, Coding, and Performance Tuning) which should be familiar to analyst programmers, but with two important additions: at first there is a new phase called Performance Test which begins at the end of the software development cycle and will measure and evaluate the complete application. Secondly, every software phase contains Performance focal points, which are appropriate for that software segment.

Now let's see in more detail how a complete software cycle is carried on with performance in mind:

  • Analysis: Producing high quality, fast applications always starts with a correct analysis of your software requirements. In this phase you have to define what the software is expected to do by providing a set of scenarios that illustrate your functional domain. This translates in creating use cases, which are diagrams that describe the interactions of users within the system. These use cases are a crucial step in determining what type of benchmarks are needed by your system: for example, here we assume that your application will be accessed by 500 concurrent users, each of whom will start a database connection to retrieve data from a database as well as use a JMS connection to fire an action. Software analysis, however, spans beyond the software requirements and should consider critical information, such as the kind of hardware where the application will run or the network interfaces that will support its communication.

  • Design: In this phase, the overall software structure and its nuances are defined. Critical points like the number of tiers needed for the package architecture, the database design, and the data structure design are all defined in this phase. A software development model is thus created. The role of performance in this phase is fundamental, architects should perform the following:

    • Quickly evaluate different algorithms, data structures, and libraries to see which are most efficient.

    • Design the application so that it is possible to accommodate any changes if there are new requirements that could impact performance.

  • Code: The design must be now translated into a machine-readable form. The code generation step performs this task. If the design is performed in a detailed manner, code generation can be accomplished without much complication. If you have completed the previous phases with an eye on tuning you should partially know which functions are critical for the system, and code them in the most efficient way. We say "partially" because only when you have dropped the last line of code will you be able to test the complete application and see where it runs quickly and where it needs to be improved.

  • Performance Test: This step completes the software production cycle and should be performed before releasing the application into production. Even if you have been meticulous at performing the previous steps, it is absolutely normal that your application doesn't meet all the performance requirements on the first try. In fact, you cannot predict every aspect of performance, so it is necessary to complete your software production with a performance test. A performance test is an iterative process that you use to identify and eliminate bottlenecks until your application meets its performance objectives. You start by establishing a baseline. Then you collect data, analyze the results, and make configuration changes based on the analysis. After each set of changes, you retest and measure to verify that your application has moved closer to its performance objectives.

The following image synthesizes the cyclic process of performance tuning:

Building the performance test

You are now aware that performance tuning is an iterative process which continues until the software has met your goals in terms of Response Time and Throughput. Let's see more in detail how to proceed with every single step of the process:

Establish a baseline

The first part of performance tuning consists of building up a baseline. In practice you need to figure out the conditions under which the application will perform. The more you understand exactly how your application will be used, the more successful your performance tuning will be. If you have invested some days in an accurate analysis you should have already got the basis upon which you will develop your performance objectives which are usually measured in terms of response times, throughput (requests per second), and resource utilization level.

Tip

Plan for average users or for peak?

There are many types of statistics that can be useful when you are building a baseline, however one of your goals should be to develop a profile of your application's workload with special attention to the peaks. For example, many business applications experience daily or monthly peaks depending on a variety of factors. This is especially true for organizations like travel agencies or airline companies which expect great differences in workload in different periods of the year. In this kind of scenario, it doesn't make sense to set up a baseline on the average number of users: you have no choice but to use the worst case; that is the peak of users.

Collect data

In order to collect data, all applications should be instrumented to provide information for performance analysis. This can be broken down in a set of activities:

  • Set up your application server with the same settings and hardware as the production environment and produce a replica of database/naming directories if you can't use the production legacy systems for testing.

  • Isolate the testing environment so that you don't skew those tests by involving network traffic that doesn't belong in your tests.

  • Install the appropriate tools, which will start the load test and the counterpart software that collect data from the benchmark. The next chapter will point you towards some great resources which can be used to start a session of performance tuning.

How long should data collection last?

If you surf the net you can find plenty of benchmarks affirming that X is faster than Y. Even if micro benchmarks are useful to quickly calculate the response of a single variable (for example, the time to execute a stored procedure), they are of little or no use for testing complex systems. Why? Because many factors in enterprise systems produce their effects after the system has been tested extensively: think about caching systems or JVM garbage collection tuning as a clue.

Investing a huge amount of time for your tuning session is, however, not realistic as you will likely fail to meet your budget goals, so your performance tests should be completed by a fixed timeline.

Balancing these two factors, we could say that a good performance tuning session should last at least 20-30 minutes (besides warm-up activities, if any) for bread-and-butter applications like the sample Pet Store demo application (http://java.sun.com/developer/releases/petstore/). Larger applications, on the other hand, require more functionality to test and engage a considerable amount of system resources. A complete test plan can demand, in this case, some hours or even days to be completed. As a matter of fact, some dynamics (like the garbage collector) can take time to unfold its effects; benchmarking these kinds of applications on a short-time basis can thus be useless or even misleading.

Luckily you can organize your time in such a way that the tuning sessions are planned carefully during the day and then executed with batch scripts at night.

Analyze data

With the amount of data collected, you have evidence of which areas show a performance penalty: keep in mind, however, that this might just be the symptom of a problem which arises in a different area of your application. Technically speaking the analysis procedure can be split into the following activities:

  1. Identify the locations of any bottlenecks.

  2. Think of a hypothesis which could be the cause of the bottleneck.

  3. Consider any factors that may prove/disprove your hypothesis.

At the end of these activities, you should be ready to create a new test which isolates the factor that we suppose to be the cause of the bottleneck.

For example, supposing you are in the middle of a tuning session of an enterprise application. You have identified (Step 1) that the application occasionally pauses and cannot complete all transactions within the strict timeout setting.

Your hypothesis (Step 2) is that the garbage collector configuration needs to be changed because it's likely that there are too many full cycles of garbage collection (garbage collection is explained in detail in Chapter 3, Core JVM Tuning).

As a proof of your hypothesis (Step 3) you are going to add in the configuration a switch that prints the details of each garbage collection.

In definitive, by carefully examining performance indicators, you can correctly isolate the problem and thus identify the main problems, which must be addressed first. If the data you collect is not complete, then your analysis is likely to be inaccurate and you might need to retest and collect the missing information or use further analysis tools.

Configure and test again

When your analysis has terminated you should have a list of indicators that need testing: you should first establish a priority list so that you can first address those issues that are likely to provide the maximum payoff.

Tip

It's important to stress that you must apply each change individually otherwise you can distort the results and make it difficult to identify potential new performance issues.

And that's it! Get your instruments ready and launch another session of performance testing. You can stop adjusting and measuring when you believe you're close enough to the response times to satisfy your requirements.

As a side note consider that optimizing code can introduce new bugs so the application should be tested during the optimization phase. A particular optimization should not be considered valid until the application using that optimization's code path has passed quality assessment.