Monitoring and performance tuning

Monitoring and performance tuning are essential parts of any WebSphere Commerce site administration while in production. You must monitor the servers to ensure that they are running smoothly and troubleshoot problems as they occur.

More importantly, before launching into production, tune the performance of servers to achieve optimal performance based on the current system resources and expected traffic load.

Performance tuning is as much an art as it is a science. It is often done based on trial and error. You adjust the parameters on a server, monitor its performance over time, and measure the improvement achieved as a result of these updated settings. If the results are not as expected, you adjust the settings again. Avoid making any tuning changes directly on production servers. You should have a performance test environment that is similar in capacity and configuration to your production environment. After you test any tuning changes and are satisfied with the result on the performance test servers, you may make the same changes on the production servers.

Performance problems can be encountered almost anywhere. The problem can be network and hardware related or back-end system related. The problem can be actual product bugs, or quite often, application design issues.

Understanding the flow used to diagnose a problem helps to establish the monitoring that should be in place for your site to detect and correct performance problems. The first dimension is the user view,-the black box view of your Web site. This is an external perspective of how the overall Web site is performing from a user's point of view and identifies how long the response time is for an user. From this black box perspective, it is important to understand the load and response time on your site. To monitor at this level, many industry monitoring tools allow you to inject and monitor synthetic transactions, helping you identify when your Web site experiences a problem.

The second step is to understand the basic health of all the systems and networks that make an user request. This is the external view, which typically leverages tools and utilities provided with the systems and applications running. In this stage, it is of fundamental importance to understand the health of every system involved, including Web servers, application servers, databases, back-end systems, and so on. This dimension corresponds to the what resource is constrained portion of the problem diagnosis. To monitor at this level, you need to use product-specific tools and logs.

This section of the book covers the following:

  • Various tools that are available to help you monitor servers at different tiers: operating system, database server, application server, Web server, and Load Balancer

  • Key tuning parameters at various tiers
xxxx