Java High Performance Application Software Tutorial: The popularity of the J2EE platform and Java application servers enables rapid application development and deployment. This article establishes the workload, performance metrics, methodology, and environment for a tuning project based on the SPECjAppServer family of benchmarks. Learn more about improving your high performance application software in this J2EE tutorial.

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by Kingsum Chow, PhD, senior performance architect with the Managed Runtime Environments group, Intel Corp.

The popularity of the J2EE platform and Java application servers enables rapid application development and deployment. Many developers have now moved to build their applications using commercially available J2EE application servers such as BEA WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere Application Server, and Oracle Application Server.

This article establishes the workload, performance metrics, methodology, and environment for a tuning project based on the SPECjAppServer family of benchmarks. A companion article to this one includes the actual case study of an optimization based on the measures established in this article. The study uses a four-way application server based on Itanium 2 processors running the BEA WebLogic application server and the JRockit JVM under Windows.

Establishing the workload and performance metrics
In order to provide a recognizable point of reference, this study uses SPECjAppServer2002 as a standard benchmark for our exploration. SPECjAppServer2002 provides a complete Web application that uses a large and representative sample of J2EE APIs to benchmark performance of individual systems against one another. Many of the findings in this paper are applicable to future releases of the SPECjAppServer family of benchmarks as well.