Performance tuning starts from the day the application deployment stage begins. One may ask, as the application is only in the development phase, why do we need to do performance tuning now?
At the time of the application development, we are in the state to define the architecture of the application, how the application is going to perform in reality, and how many resources are required for an application. There are no predefined steps for performance tuning. But there are certain thumb rules which all administrators should follow for performance tuning.
The following figure shows the process flow for performance tuning:
Note
If you are proactively checking the application and avoid bottlenecks for the application, then around 70 percent of the issues are solved in the production environment. This approach will give your customers great satisfaction when using the application.
- Proper Logging and Monitoring: Proper logging should be enabled for Tomcat, this will be really helpful in tracing the potential issues which are about to occur in the production system. We will discuss different methods of enabling logger in Chapter 6, Logging in Tomcat 7. It is always recommended to monitor the system on a regular basis.
Note
There are many monitoring tools available in the market, which give you a real picture of the application. Major enterprises use these kind of tools for profiling the application. For example, JON(Jboss on Network), CA Wily, Nagios, Panorama, and so on.
- Knowledge base for the application and issue trends: It is always recommended to have a knowledge base for the application as the application is running 24x7. Also, we should have a good documentation for the application's support, so that everyone who is working on this application has the same information on the issues.
- Follow the problem management approach: Make it good practice to perform the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for every issue. This way recurrence of this issue can be avoided in the future.
We have discussed the approaches for tuning Tomcat 7. Now, it's time to do real-time performance tuning for Tomcat 7.