Optimization; Knowing Where To Start - IBM BS029ML - WebSphere Portal Server Self Help Manual

Registry Service loads and caches a small number of objects that are regularly accessed
in the engine. This improves performance; however, the trade off is that the cached objects
are possibly stale compared to their database counterparts. This applies particularly in a
cluster environment. If the age of those objects causes a problem, try reducing the refresh
rate for the respective entities.
For a complete list of the Portal Services provided with WebSphere Portal Server V6.0.x, and
a description of the many parameters that can be tuned with regards to each service, consult
the WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 Information Center.
To provide performance and deployment options, some Portal Services, such as search and
document conversion, can be executed remotely. The Portal Search service can now reside
on a separate machine or as part of a Portal cluster. The remote search service can be
utilized either through the SOAP protocol or through EJB. This allows Portal users to search
Portal content with the remote search service, but it also allows other search engines to tap
into the remote search engine to search portal content. Document conversion is another
service that can be deployed remotely. Document Conversion Services is integrated with
Portal Document Manager and IBM Common Mail portlet. Documents received as
attachments to e-mail can be viewed in the browser even if the application that created the
document is not installed. Document Conversion Services also allows documents to be
searched by content. Document Conversion Services supports many of the most widely used
applications and converts them to HTML and XML. To better balance processing power,
Document Conversion Services can be delegated to a remote server. In this case, the service
is accessed simply with HTTP, rather than SOAP or EJB. Since WebSphere Portal Server
was designed with a Services-Oriented Architecture in mind, we have been able to continually
add new services, which can be used by IBM, our customers and our partners to build more
powerful Portlets and Portal applications. When customer requirements demand that the
service be available outside the Portal framework, we can leverage WebSphere Application
Server's support for J2EE and Web Services standards to execute remote services.

5.2 Optimization

Performance is a critical part of any WebSphere Portal Server based solution. In this section,
we look at the major parameters responsible for performance tuning WebSphere Portal
Server.
Important: No amount of tuning will resolve a performance problem attributed to a badly
written Java application. Many customers neglect this important fact and waste a
considerable amount of time and effort tweaking around with the WebSphere Portal Server
parameters in the hope that a configurational change may resolve matters. Remember, the
20:80 rule: Only a 20% improvement can normally be gained from tuning improvements,
while roughly an 80% gain is attributed to development. Therefore, we strongly recommend
following the IBM Recommended Best Practices during development.

5.2.1 Knowing where to start

Those familiar with WebSphere Portal Server will be aware that the product is actually
deployed as a J2EE Enterprise Application on top of WebSphere Application Server (or
WebSphere Process Server with certain restrictions). It is for this very reason that the
recommended starting point for implementing a WebSphere Portal Server performance
tuning exercise actually involves tuning the underlying WebSphere Application Server
instance.
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IBM WebSphere Portal V6 Self Help Guide