Performance overview

Performance is the measure of time and resources that are required to complete a task. Because of the variety of resources involved, performance tuning for Web-based applications is more complex than tuning most other applications.

To understand performance management, you need to know these basic performance concepts:

• Throughput is the number of client requests that the application server environment can process at a given time.
• Response time is the elapsed time that it takes for the application server to process a client request.
• Load is the amount of resources, such as main storage, processor, and I/O support, that are required by the application to process all client requests at a given time.

Application server performance is determined primarily by these components:

• Hardware resources such as system configuration, memory pools, and subsystems
• Web environment configuration such as garbage collection, request queuing, and data caching
• Application design and implementation such as object creation, connection pooling, and data access configuration

See these topics for more information about performance and the resources that are available to help you optimize performance:

Performance guidelines
This topic provides general guidelines that can help you ensure optimal performance.

Performance resources
This topic provides links to additional references and tools that can help you optimize performance.