Database Reference
In-Depth Information
factors that may come into play that degrade the performance of your infrastruc-
ture. For example, inadequate hardware that runs your infrastructure, improp-
er code design, impeding endpoint applications, and network clogging are just
some of the many factors that undermine the effectiveness of any enterprise
system. However, when you are confident that these problems are not interfer-
ing with the performance of your infrastructure, it is time to look towards tuning
your SOA environment. As an administrator, it is important for you to roadmap
your performance planning, as optimization is normally a tradeoff between per-
formance, reliability, environmental complexity, maintainabililty, and security, and
decisions have to be made after carefully weighing the pros and cons and prior-
ities.
The first step is to review your existing infrastructure and applications followed
by devising a tuning strategy accordingly. There are a few things to remember
and act on when embarking on any performance tuning exercise:
•
Ensure that you follow change control. Make backups before you try to tune
the existing infrastructure so that you can revert to a previous state should
it prove necessary. See
Chapter 9
,
Backup and Recovery
, for further details
on backup and recovery.
•
Benchmark your tuning by taking a baseline of the performance before and
after changing any settings. This is the only way you will know whether your
changes have had any impact on performance or not.
•
Make sure you understand key tuning areas and plan the tuning exercise. If
it is unclear precisely where the problem lies and where to begin, it is even
more important to plan a performance tuning regime before approaching it.
You will shortly see a methodology to do so.
•
It is also necessary to document the changes made and their impact on per-
formance. This will help in understanding why a change was made and give
a clearer picture on the performance of the system.
As mentioned earlier, you need to first develop a performance tuning plan for
your environment. You should also be aware that tuning and optimization can
only take you to a certain extent in meeting your overall performance standards.
When you have exhausted optimization techniques, or when the optimizations
themselves compromise factors essential to your infrastructure, such as secur-
