Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
In the next section we will talk about the resource monitoring and performance
tuning steps in detail.
Resource monitoring and
performance tuning
One of the most important steps in a load testing exercise is resource monitoring
and performance tuning. In
Chapter 1
,
Architectural Best Practices
, we looked at
the reference architecture of a Liferay-Portal-based solution. In the reference
architecture, we have used different components to build a high performing portal
solution. Performance of the solution depends upon each of the components of
reference architecture. Hence, during a load test, monitoring the performance of
every component is required. In this section, we will talk about resource monitoring
of various components. We will also learn about how to read resource monitoring
data and tune the system.
Liferay Portal server - monitoring and tuning
As we know, Liferay Portal runs on an application server. In our reference
architecture, we used Tomcat as the application server. There are many resources
of Liferay Portal, such as JVM, thread pool, or cache engine, which can affect the
overall performance of the system. It is required to closely monitor these resources
during a load test to optimize the performance. Before we proceed with individual
resource monitoring and tuning, let's learn about some of the key monitoring tools
and how to configure them with Liferay Portal.
JConsole
JConsole is a GUI-based tool for monitoring applications launched using JVM. It
is a
Java Management Extension
(
JMX
) compliant tool. It can be used to monitor
JVM Heap, CPU usage, garbage collection, threads, and JMX-enabled beans. It is a
very lightweight tool and adds a minor overhead on the running application. The
JConsole utility comes as a part of Oracle JDK installation. It can connect to any
remote or local Java-based applications. In order to connect JConsole with a remote
application, the JMX port on the remote JVM has to be configured. Let's learn how
to configure our Liferay Portal nodes to enable JConsole-based monitoring:
1.
Stop both the Liferay Portal nodes if they are running.
