Performance notes

Consider these performance issues:

• We can update notifications directly from the policy server. We can also configure the resource managers to verify the version of the master authorization policy database every few minutes. This verification ensures the update notifications are not missed. Such a mechanism is called polling and is not enabled by default.

  If an update notification fails to reach a server, a log entry is created. In both cases, a retry mechanism also ensures the update happens in the future.

• The cached authorization policy information results in high system performance. For example, when WebSEAL does an authorization check, it checks the policy in its own cached version of the database. WebSEAL does not have to access the network to obtain this information from the master database. The result is fast response times (performance) for authorization checks.

• Individual authorization results are not cached by the calling application server.

Parent topic: Replication for scalability and performance