IBM WebSphere Application Server Performance Cookbook

WebSphere Application Server Traditional

WAS Traditional is also known as Traditional WAS (tWAS) or WAS Classic.

WAS Traditional Recipe

  1. Review the Operating System recipe for your OS. The highlights are to ensure CPU, RAM, network, and disk are not consistently saturated.
  2. Review the Java recipe for your JVM. The highlights are to tune the maximum heap size (-Xmx), the maximum nursery size (-Xmn) and enable verbose garbage collection and review its output with the GCMV tool.
  3. Depending on which application components are used, ensure that the relevant thread pools are not consistently saturated (e.g. WebContainer, ORB.thread.pool, SIBJMSRAThreadPool, WMQJCAResourceAdapter, etc.).
  4. If using databases, connection pools should not be consistently saturated. Tune each pool's Maximum connections. <connectionManager maxPoolSize="X" />. Also consider tuning each the statement cache size, isolation level, purge policy, and test with globalConnectionTypeOverride=unshared.
  5. If using JMS MDBs without a message ordering requirement, tune activation specifications' maximum concurrency to control the maximum concurrent MDB invocations and maximum batch size to control message batch delivery size.
  6. If using HTTP session database persistence, tune the write frequency.
  7. Consider reducing the default Hung Thread Detection threshold and interval which will print a warning and stack trace when requests exceed a time threshold.
  8. If using security, consider tuning the authentication cache and LDAP sizes.
  9. If Single Sign On (SSO) is enabled, test whether performance is better with web inbound attribute propagation enabled (default) or disabled.
  10. If possible, configure and use servlet caching/Dynacache.
  11. If using EJBs, consider tuning the ORB such as -Dcom.ibm.CORBA.ConnectionMultiplicity, -Dcom.ibm.CORBA.FragmentSize, and -Dcom.ibm.CORBA.MaxOpenConnections.
  12. If using TLS, set -DtimeoutValueInSSLClosingHandshake=1.
  13. Review logs for any errors, warnings, or high volumes of messages, and use -Dcom.ibm.ejs.ras.disablerasnotifications=true if you're not using JMX log notifications.
  14. Monitor, at minimum, response times, number of requests, thread pools, connection pools, and CPU and Java heap usage using TPV/PMI and/or a third party monitoring program.
  15. Upgrade to the latest version and fixpack of WAS and Java as there is a history of making performance improvements over time.
  16. Consider setting Unlimited persistent requests per connection to maximize the lifetime of keep-alive sockets.
  17. If the applications don't use resources in META-INF/resources directories of embedded JAR files, then set com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.SkipMetaInfResourcesProcessing = true.
  18. Consider enabling the HTTP NCSA access log with response times for post-mortem traffic analysis.
  19. Consider running with a sampling profiler such as Health Center for post-mortem troubleshooting.

WAS Basics

"In general, a large number of applications will realize some improvement from tuning in three core areas: the JVM, thread pools, and connection pools." (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0909_blythe/0909_blythe.html)

Review all messages in SystemOut.log, SystemErr.log (or HPEL logs), native_stdout.log, native_stderr.log, application logs (such as log4j), and First Failure Data Capture (FFDC) logs. Note that with FFDC logs, an exception will often only create an FFDC stack and information file on the first occurrence (this is the design of FFDC), but you can review the _exception.log summary file for the number of times that exception was thrown.

Review the WAS logs and eliminate (or try to reduce) any warnings and exceptions. If customers say, "Oh, those warnings/errors are 'normal'," persist in investigating them anyway and pushing for them to be eliminated. Imagine you are tuning a sports car for optimal performance and there's a warning light in the dashboard. Yes, it is possible that the warning is "normal" and will not impact performance, but unless you have direct evidence that this is so, you should go under the assumption that such warnings and errors are signs of potential performance problems. You should resolve any warnings that the designers of the car thought worthy of highlighting. Such warnings may have indirect or subtle performance impacts that may not be easy to theoretically understand. At minimum, the system is spending resources tracking and reacting to these warning conditions. In the case of exceptions, these include stack traces which may cost a significant amount to create, even if an exception is caught and suppressed.

Continue to monitor for warnings and errors during performance runs, particularly hung thread warnings (WSVR0605W) and CPU starvation warnings (HMGR0152W).

If you don't know the host names and ports of the various nodes and servers but you have access to the configuration, consult the file ${WAS}/profiles/${PROFILE}/config/cells/${CELL}/nodes/${NODE}/serverindex.xml and search for the relevant virtual hosts such as WC_adminhost_secure and WC_defaulthost. The administrative server is normally at https://${DMGRHOST}:${DMGRADMINHOST_SECUREPORT}/admin

Review the WAS FDA/config/appserver/server.xml and FDA/config/appserver/node.resources.xml files in the latest SPECj results submitted by IBM (click Full Disclosure Archive): http://www.spec.org/jEnterprise2010/results/res2013q2/jEnterprise2010-20130402-00042.html

Key administrative concepts:

  • An installation of WAS Network Deployment has a set of 0 or more profiles which represent nodes. These nodes share the same runtime binaries. An installation is either 32-bit or 64-bit
  • A profile/node is a set of 0 or more managed servers (most commonly, application servers). The node has a process called the node agent which manages the configuration of the servers, and may also orchestrate their runtime behavior (starting and stopping them, restarting failed application servers, etc.).
  • A special type of profile/node is the deployment manager profile (dmgr). This profile represents a cell, which is a set of 1 or more nodes, including the deployment manager node/server itself. The deployment manager holds the primary configuration data for the whole cell and the deployment manager runs the Administrative Console application which is used to administer the whole cell.
  • To participate in a cell, a node must be federated with the deployment manager profile using tooling or the "addNode" command from the newly created profile's bin directory.
  • Usually, WAS will be installed on one physical/virtual machine with a single deployment manager profile/node, and then a set of 1 or more other physical/virtual machines will install WAS with a single profile/node (representing that machine) federated into the deployment manager.
  • When a configuration change is made in the deployment manager, nodes must be synchronized with the deployment manager to get the updated changes. By default, this happens automatically every 1 minute (see the node agent's file synchronization service settings). Nodes can also be manually synchronized while saving the changes into the DMGR (click Review, and then check the box to synchronize the nodes), or through the Nodes collection under System Administration. For example, if you have 10 machines, with 5 application servers each, you install an application into the deployment manager, then when the nodes are synchronized, the application will be distributed to all the nodes and then it can be started across all of those servers.

Performance Tuning Templates

WAS ships with a set of tuning templates including a production tuning template for a typical production environment. The script is found in ${WAS}/bin/applyPerfTuningTemplate.py and the production template is found in ${WAS}/scriptLibraries/perfTuning/V70/peak.props.

The production tuning template applies the following changes (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSAW57_9.0.5/com.ibm.websphere.nd.multiplatform.doc/ae/tprf_tuneappserv_script.html); however, we recommend re-enabling PMI after the script completes.

Note: Although the production tuning template is in a folder named V70, it applies to later versions of WAS.

Here is a Unix example of running the production tuning template on one application server. This assumes that the deployment manager and node agent are started.

$ cd ${WAS}/bin/
$ ./wsadmin.sh -lang jython -f applyPerfTuningTemplate.py -nodeName node1 -serverName server1 -templateFile ../scriptLibraries/perfTuning/V70/peak.props

General Tuning

Check "Start components as needed" to potentially improve startup time by not starting components of the application server that are not used (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSAW57_8.5.5/com.ibm.websphere.nd.doc/ae/urun_rappsvr.html).

Tune the XML parser definitions by updating the jaxp.properties and xerces.properties files in the ${app_server_root}/jre/lib and adding:

javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl
javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuildFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl
org.apache.xerces.xni.parser.XMLParserConfiguration=org.apache.xerces.parsers.XIncludeAwareParserConfiguration

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSAW57_8.5.5/com.ibm.websphere.nd.doc/ae/tprf_tuneappserv.html

Shared Libraries

Use shared libraries where possible to reduce memory usage.

Change Java Software Development Kit (SDK)

In recent versions of WAS, use the managesdk command to change the Java Software Development Kit: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSAW57_8.5.5/com.ibm.websphere.nd.multiplatform.doc/ae/rxml_managesdk.html?lang=en

Example: List available SDKs:

$ ./managesdk.sh -listAvailable
CWSDK1003I: Available SDKs :
CWSDK1005I: SDK name: 1.7_64
CWSDK1005I: SDK name: 1.6_64

Example: Change SDK for all profiles:

$ ./managesdk.sh -enableProfileAll -sdkName 1.7_64
CWSDK1017I: Profile AppSrv01 now enabled to use SDK 1.7_64.

Idle CPU

See Idle WebSphere Tuning Considerations

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