WAS Classic Recipes

1. Upgrade to the latest version and fixpack of WAS as it has a history of making performance improvements over time.
2. Use the Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) to monitor various statistics such as thread pool usage, database connection pools, etc. Use a tool such as IBM ITCAM, IBM Tivoli Performance Viewer (TPV) in the Administrative Console, the WAS Performance Tuning Toolkit, etc.
3. Thread pools should not be consistently saturated.
4. Database connection pools should not be consistently saturated.
5. Monitor response times of key application components (e.g. servlets, databases, MDBs, etc.).
6. Apply the production performance tuning template.
7. On recent versions of WAS, explicitly install and switch to Java version 7.
8. Switch to High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) and disable JMX log notifications (-Dcom.ibm.ejs.ras.disablerasnotifications=true).
9. Review SystemOut/SystemErr/HPEL, FFDC and application logs for any errors, warnings, or high volumes of messages.
10. If possible, configure and use servlet caching/Dynacache.
11. Don't neglect to monitor and tune the node agents and deployment manager (particularly garbage collection).
12. Ensure that when WAS fixpacks have been applied, the correct service release of Java was also upgraded: https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27005002
13. If Single Sign On (SSO) is enabled, test whether performance is better with web inbound attribute propagation enabled (default) or disabled.

For details, see the WAS Classic chapter.