Tuning Web Container

Use

The Web-based applications that you deploy and run on the J2EE Engine rely on HTTP for their communication with the clients. In this section you can find guidelines for tuning the mechanisms for connection management and request processing.

Activities

You can improve the HTTP communication by tuning:

·        Connection establishment and maintenance

The system stores the indications for incoming HTTP requests in a queue. When the queue fills up, HTTP Provider Service refuses further connections. To increase the number of accepted HTTP requests, you can set a bigger size of the queue. However, this leads to increased memory consumption. Therefore, you need enough memory resources to use this feature. For more information, see Setting up HTTP Provider Service to Accept Incoming Requests.

HTTP Provider Service enables the establishment of persistent connections. Using the KeepAliveTimeout property of the service on dispatchers, you can set the timeout for the persistent connections. You can consider increasing the timeout in the following cases:

¡        You have sufficient memory resources to keep the persistent connections open longer

¡        The client-server communication is slow – that is, the interval between two successive client requests through the connection is more than 15 seconds, which is the default value of the property)

¡        Your application relies on persistent connections and uses them properly as described in the HTTP 1.1 specification

¡        Your proxy server provides a sufficient level of security

You can decrease the KeepAliveTimeout if your application does not rely on persistent connections, or you have insufficient memory resources.

If the number of client connections to the dispatcher increases drastically, you can tune the connections manipulation mechanism in the appropriate mode.

·        Request processing:

You can speed up request processing and minimize the response times using the following functions:

...

¡        HTTP response compression

¡        HTTP cache

¡        Long Data Transfer Mechanism

¡        JSP compilation at startup

In addition, performance can be also influenced by:

¡        Increasing the value of the ReadBufferSize property of HTTP Provider Service on the Java dispatcher – this option is useful when the bodies of the HTTP requests are large

¡        Setting up the size of the InputStream read buffer

¡        Configuring the size of the file buffer

The property SocketTcpNoDelay, which by default is set to true, improves performance when small-sized requests are exchanged. Therefore, we recommend you do not change the value of this property.