Performance

WebSphere Commerce is a complex interaction between a number of products. Each product has its own performance characteristics and within the interaction of the various components, there are a number of places where performance can be affected by incorrect configuration or insufficient resources.

Performance objectives include handling the following types of requests in a timely manner:

• Handling multiple customer requests

• Accessing data in the WebSphere Commerce database

• Formatting data as Web pages

• Returning responses to the customer's browser

To optimize WebSphere Commerce, consider the following components:

• Hardware

  Make sure your machine meets the minimum machine requirements.

  In a production environment with a lot of concurrent users, multiple processors will help increase performance. Using a faster processor will generally speed up most operations.

• Database

  See the Redbook - DB2 UDB V8 and WebSphere V5 Performance Tuning and Operations Guide for more information about DB2 Database tuning.

  Verify the maximum database connection pool size is sufficient to handle all concurrent tasks (for example, HTTP connection, scheduler threads, and so on).

• WebSphere Commerce

  Make sure the server is I/O bound - the WebSphere Commerce system performance may be impacted if a lot of file access or network access is occurring. For example, if all logging and tracing is turned on, the system could spend most of the time writing data to the disk instead of handling the workload.

  Use dynamic caching as documented in Dynamic caching.

  If you are using server-based session management, see the Tuning session management and Tuning performance parameter index topics in the WAS Information Center.

• WAS

  See the Tuning performance parameter index topic in the WAS Information Center.

• Other considerations:

  • WebSphere Datasource (Minimum and Maximum Connection pool size, Statement Cache Size)

  • Web site design

  • Security (configuration, time outs, authentication, and access control)

  • Web server issues (process handling, resource usage, fast response cache accelerator)

  • WebSphere engine issues (Java Virtual Machine or JVM, transport queue, the caching of JSP files, EJB container)

  • WebSphere Commerce session management (caching, storing sessions in memory or storing sessions in the database)

  • WAS session management, (setting for the in-memory session count, allow overflow, timeout interval, and Distributed Environment setting).

  • NFS (Network File System) performance tuning (file server tuning)

 

Related Concepts

Performance monitoring using the WebSphere Commerce PMI module

 

Related tasks

Tuning your Java Virtual Machine (JVM) settings