WebSphere Commerce is a complex interaction between a number of products. Each product has its own performance characteristics and within the interaction of the various components, there are a number of places where performance can be affected by incorrect configuration or insufficient resources. Performance objectives include handling the following types of requests in a timely manner:
- Handling multiple customer requests
- Accessing data in the WebSphere Commerce database
- Formatting data as Web pages
- Returning responses to the shopper's browser
To optimize WebSphere Commerce, consider the following components:
- General WebSphere Commerce capacity planning. See the appendix "Capacity planning for WebSphere Commerce implementations" in the WebSphere Commerce Installation Guide. This appendix contains capacity planning information for the Web server, database, and WebSphere Application Server when used with WebSphere Commerce.
- Hardware
Make sure your machine meets the minimum machine requirements as documented in the WebSphere Commerce Installation Guide.
In a production environment with a lot of concurrent users, multiple CPUs will help increase performance. Using a faster CPU will generally speed up most operations.
- Database
For DB2 Database tuning, please refer to the Redbook: DB2/UDB WebSphere Performance Tuning Guide.
Make sure that the maximum database connection pool size is sufficient to handle all concurrent tasks (for example, HTTP connection, scheduler threads, and so on).
- WebSphere Commerce
Make sure the server is I/O Bound - the WebSphere Commerce system performance may be impacted if a lot of file access or network access is occurring. For example, if all logging and tracing is turned on, the system could spend most of the time writing data to the disk instead of handling the workload.
Use dynamic caching as documented in Dynamic Caching.
When you are using server-based session management refer to the guidelines in the tuning information in the section on "Tuning Performance" in theWebSphere Application Server Information Center.
- WebSphere Application Server
Use the section on "Tuning Performance" in theWebSphere Application Server Information Center as a guideline on how to tune the system.
- IBM Tivoli Web Site Analyzer
By capturing, analyzing, storing and reporting on Web site usage, health, integrity and site content, the IBM Tivoli Web Site Analyzer can shed light on visitor site interactions and the site's overall performance. You can leverage this insight to optimize the site for increased customer loyalty and e-business effectiveness. Web Site Analyzer can track the popularity of page content and product purchases for targeted offers or for campaigns to specific visitors or customer segments. It can indicate where a decrease in investment or possible change in web navigation should occur due to less visited Web or product pages.
Tivoli Web Site Analyzer is provided with WebSphere Commerce. For more information about the Tivoli Web Site Analyzer, refer to the WebSphere Commerce Additional Software Guide and to the IBM Tivoli Web Site Analyzer Web site.
- Other considerations:
- WebSphere Datasource (Minimum and Maximum Connection pool size, Statement Cache Size)
- Web site design
- Security (configuration, time outs, authentication, and access control)
- Web server issues (process handling, resource usage, fast response cache accelerator)
- WebSphere engine issues (Java Virtual Machine or JVM, transport queue, the caching of JSP files, EJB container)
- WebSphere Commerce session management (caching, storing sessions in memory or storing sessions in the database)
- WebSphere Application Server session management, (setting for the in-memory session count, allow overflow, timeout interval, and Distributed Environment setting).
- NFS (Network File System) performance tuning (file server tuning)