How do I Tune the Web Container?

The Web container provides tunable parameters that can improve the performance of Server and applications running on it. The Console provides a user-friendly way to modify the parameters, at runtime. Changes are ultimately affected in the in web-config.xml file located in <install_dir>\server\nodes\config folder. The < tag in the Server configuration file contains parameters that can be modified.

The Web container can be tuned using the Web-based Console. All tunable parameters can be entered in the <performance-tuning-properties> tag in the web-config.xml file.

Some Performance Tuning Tips

The Maximum Acceptor Threads field is the number of acceptor threads that accept the connections from the clients. This count can be increased or decreased during run-time through the Console, or by editing the web-config.xml. The entry in web-config.xml is:

<acceptor-thread-count>5</acceptor-thread-count>

The default value is 5.

Worker Thread Count for the server should be increased accordingly if the acceptor thread count is increased. Worker thread count cannot be updated on runtime through the Console as of today. This option will be provided as an option in future.

For now, the worker thread count can be increased by updating the worker-thread-count in web-config.xml. The default value for the maximum worker thread count is 200 with Keep-Alive count as 150. It is better to have keep-alive count less than the maximim worker thread count. This ensures that if there is a high trafiic of requests, requests get served without making some clients starve. The value of maximim worker thread count can be modified as:

• Increase to 200 and above: For a high load server, the count can be 200 or more. If set to a lower value, a lot of requests will be in queue before they can be processed.
• Decrease to 20-30: For a lower request rate with high process time, the count can be set to a lower value as 20 or 30. If set to a higher value, the inactive threads will consume memory and flood the listener socket to check with new requests. This degrades the VM performance.

Note: The value can be decreased to 1/10th of the total number of requests received at peak loads collected by statistics.

Web sites with many hits but lesser processing time, static pages, and dynamic pages with lower process times should have high worker thread count. For Web sites having high processing time with comparably low hit rate, the worker thread count value should be lower.

Each request requires a single thread. Concurrent processing of high loads require equal number of threads. Number of threads should be limited to a lower value depending on the OS and available resources.

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