joining a critsit in a large bank in Athens – WebSphere Portal 5.1, WCM, TAM ,TDS, TDI, ESB, db2, etc. Massive performance issues caused by inadequately tuning the environment, lack of system resources – basically returned to default values following tuning guides. Primary intention was to stabilize environment, as well as providing mid- to long term recommendations about how to manage the infrastructure and systems / applications.

Athens is a beast with traffic collapsing – would go mad living here. Akropolis area (Plaka) very touristic (what did I expect), but nice to switch off from a busy day (apart from all the little gangsters trying to get hold of your money).

check Apache server version by creating a simple e.g. serverinfo.php file with following statement: <?php phpinfo(); ?>

and open in your browser: http://your host/serverinfo.php. Find the version info in the Apache Version section:

Apache Version – Apache/2.0.53 (Linux/SUSE)

or run from the command line:

/usr/sbin # apache2ctl -v

Server version: Apache/2.0.53

Server built: Aug 30 2006 13:14:23

h969344:/usr/sbin #

Next add mod_status to your APACHE_MODULES by editing /etc/sysconfig/apache2 configuration – the Status module allows a server administrator to find out how well a server is performing. A HTML page is presented that gives the current server statistics in an easily readable form:

APACHE_MODULES=

“access actions alias auth auth_dbm autoindex cgi

dir env expires headers include log_config mime

mod_status negotiation setenvif

ssl suexec userdir php4 rewrite”

In the same file and if extended logging is needed, set APACHE_EXTENDED_STATUS=”on” – be careful here, this will degrade performance.

Edit httpd.conf and add a Location section to your virtualhost section (remove Include /etc/apache2/mod_status.conf):

<VirtualHost *:80>

….

<Location /server-status>

SetHandler server-status

# Order deny,allow

# Deny from all

Allow from .yourdomain

</Location>

….

</VirtualHost>

restart the HTTP server: /usr/sbin/rcapache2 restart

You should see your Apache server status now by issuing this URL: http://yourHost/server-status providing the following information:

• The number of worker serving requests
• The number of idle worker
• The status of each worker, the number of requests that worker has performed and the total number of bytes served by the worker (*)
• A total number of accesses and byte count served (*)
• The time the server was started/restarted and the time it has been running for
• Averages giving the number of requests per second, the number of bytes served per second and the average number of bytes per request (*)
• The current percentage CPU used by each worker and in total by Apache (*)
• The current hosts and requests being processed (*)

The lines marked “(*)” are only available if ExtendedStatus is On

awstats

To display HTTP server log information in a graphical form, install awstats:

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically.

Copy awstats to a directory of your choice, installation defaults to /usr/local/awstats. Then run the awstats configuration process: perl awstats_configure.pl, which will add directives to your httpd.conf and create a configuration file (default location: /etc/awstats)

<Directory “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot”>

Options all

AllowOverride None

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

Alias /awstatsclasses “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/classes/”

Alias /awstatscss “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/css/”

Alias /awstatsicons “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/icon/”

ScriptAlias /awstats/ “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/”

Once done run the data import process from the cgi-bin folder of your awstats installation (you can automate this in the config file): perl awstats.pl config=yourdomain. See results of your site: http://yourdomain/awstats/awstats.pl or at this demo site

This link to part II of the tutorial.

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There are many tools for verbose GC log analysis, these tools can abstract useful information, and illustrate the trend of JVM heap size usage over time as the following. [SinglePic not found]

IBM Pattern Modeling and Analysis Tool for Java Garbage Collector (PMAT) parses the IBM verbose GC trace and provides a comprehensive analysis of the Java heap usage. It then recommends key configurations by first executing a diagnosis engine and then employing a pattern modeling algorithm in order to make recommendations to optimize the Java heap usage for a given JVM cycle.

source for this article
PMAT
JDK Diagnosis

see also here

WASX7209I: Connected to process “WebSphere_Portal” on node wcl using SOAP connector; the type of process is: unManagedProcess; WASX7029I: For help, enter: “$Help help”

wsadmin> set jvm [$AdminControl completeObjectName type=JVM,process=WebSphere_Portal,*]

WebSphere:name=JVM,process=WebSphere_Portal,
platform=dynamicproxy,node=wcl,j2eeType=JVM,
J2EEServer=WebSphere_Portal,version=6.0.2.17,
type=JVM,mbeanIdentifier=JVM,cell=wcl

wsadmin>$AdminControl invoke $jvm generateHeapDump
wsadmin>$AdminControl invoke $jvm dumpThreads

IBM’s support assistant (ISA) is an Eclipse based tool with quite a number of plugins to analyze heapdumps – a good developerworks article can be found here (part I) and here (part II).

To analyze WebSphere Portal performance issues, although this document is applicable to isolate performance problems around Java based application servers in general , see here.

see also here