Object Request Broker service settings in administrative console: WebSphere Application Server

To view this administrative console page, click Servers > Application Servers > serverName > ORB Service.

Several settings are available for controlling internal Object Request Broker (ORB) processing. Use these settings to improve application performance in the case of applications containing enterprise beans. You can make changes to these settings for the default server or any application server configured in the administrative domain.

Configuration tab

Request timeout

Specifies the number of seconds to wait before timing out on a request message.

For use in command-line scripting, the full name of this system property is com.ibm.CORBA.RequestTimeout.

Data type	int
Units	Seconds
Default	180
Range	0 to 300

ORB tracing

Enables the tracing of ORB GIOP messages.

This setting affects two system properties: com.ibm.CORBA.Debug and com.ibm.CORBA.CommTrace. If you set these properties through command-line scripting, set both to true in order to enable the tracing of GIOP messages.

Data type	Boolean
Default	Not enabled (`false`)

Pass by reference

Specifies how the ORB passes parameters. If enabled, the ORB passes parameters by reference instead of by value, which avoids making an object copy. If you do not enable pass by reference, the parameters are copied to the stack before every remote method call is made, which can be expensive.

If the EJB client and the EJB server are installed in the same WebSphere Application Server instance, and the client and server use remote interfaces, enabling Pass by reference can improve performance up to 50%. Pass by reference helps performance only where non-primitive object types are passed as parameters. Therefore, int and floats are always copied, regardless of the call model.

Enable this property with caution, because unexpected behavior can occur. If an object reference is modified by the remote method, the caller might change.

For use in command line scripting, the full name of this system property is com.ibm.CORBA.iiop.noLocalCopies.

Data type	Boolean
Default	Not enabled (false)

The use of this option for enterprise beans with remote interfaces violates the EJB Specification, Version 2.0 (see section 5.4). Object references passed to EJB methods or to EJB home methods are not copied and can be subject to corruption.

Consider the following example:

Iterator iterator = collection.iterator();
MyPrimaryKey pk = new MyPrimaryKey();
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
   pk.id = (String) iterator.next();
   MyEJB myEJB = myEJBHome.findByPrimaryKey(pk);
}

In this example, a reference to the same MyPrimaryKey object passes into WebSphere Application Server with a different ID value each time. Running this code with Pass by reference enabled causes a problem within the application server because multiple enterprise beans are referencing the same MyPrimaryKey object. To avoid this problem, set the system property com.ibm.websphere.ejbcontainer.allowPrimaryKeyMutation to true when Pass by reference is enabled. Setting Pass by reference to true causes the EJB container to make a local copy of the PrimaryKey object. As a result, however, a small portion of the performance advantage of setting Pass by reference is lost.

As a general rule, any application code that passes an object reference as a parameter to an enterprise bean method or EJB home method must be scrutinized to determine if passing that object reference results in loss of data integrity or other problems.