Sun Microsystems Portal Server 6 2005Q1, Planning Manual

Page: 135 / 192

Monitoring Portal Server
Chapter 6 The Production Environment 135
Monitoring Portal Server
This section describes the variables that affect portal performance, as well as the
portal monitoring you can perform. Areas to monitor include:
• Sun Java System Access Manager
• Portal Desktop
• Sun Java System Directory Server
• Java Virtual Machine
While emerging technologies enable you to perform detailed monitoring of Portal
Server services, this section focuses on the basic but extensive set of hardware and
software issues that determine the overall performance of a portal deployment.
Specifically, portal performance is determined by the capability of throughput and
latency over a period of time. You must conduct a baseline performance analysis as
soon as possible. The baseline performance analysis confirms that your portal
substantially conforms to published performance numbers. Establishing a
performance baseline helps you to understand infrastructure issues that can
severely impact the performance of a production portal.
Nevertheless, when maintaining a properly performing portal, you must look at a
broad set of issues. The following sections explain issues in terms of portal
performance variables and provides guidelines for determining portal efficiency.
Memory Consumption and Garbage Collection
Before reading this section, read the following document on tuning garbage
collection with the Java Virtual Machine, version 1.4.2:
http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/index.html
Portal Server requires substantial amounts of memory to provide the highest
possible throughput. At initialization, a maximum address space is virtually
reserved but does not allocate physical memory unless needed. The complete
address space reserved for object memory can be divided into the young and old
generations.
NOTE These rules also apply for performance, scalability, and stress tests.