Oracle 9iAS Performance Tuning Resources
Even if you have done a superb job in installing and configuring Oracle9iAS, if the system is not always available or if the performance is poor, then you need to start looking at tuning and optimising your 9iAS instance. Being complex, an Oracle9iAS environment has a huge amount of tuning opportunities, which essentially boil down to
- Tuning the backend 9iAS infrastructure database, in the same way you'd tune any Oracle database
- Make sure all of the caching available to you is being used - Oracle database (buffer) caching, and the web caching provided by 9iAS
- Tune the parameters of your operating system and the 9iAS components
- Add components and servers to your 9iAS farm to deal with increased demand
- Use the tools provided by Oracle, and build your own, to monitor the performance of 9iAS and the underlying databases.
With this in mind, here's some resources that will give you a head start in optimizing the performance of your Oracle 9iAS installation.
A great starting point for getting a comprehensive overview of Oracle 9iAS tuning is Don Burleson's "Oracle9iAS tuning techniques - Expert Webcast" on SearchOracle.com. Don is one of the world's top Oracle performance and tuning experts, and this free webcast explains in some considerable detail the aspects you need to consider when tuning a 9iAS instance. It's around an hour in length but well worth the investment in your time. Don in fact initially gave this presentation at the last Oracleworld in San Francisco, and you can still download the paper and powerpoint slides which are a useful resource to accompany the webcast.
The webcast also explains how STATSPACK can be used to determine infrastructure database wait events (useful for determining whether your system is disk-bound or CPU-bound) and also describes the 9iAS Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS), a rather scary-looking but useful 9iAS monitoring tool that provides metrics for the OC4J instances, servlets and Portal, and the 9iAS HTTP servers. I'd thoroughly recommend these resources as a good way to quickly gain an understanind of the 9iAS tuning process - and if you're looking to buy a book on the whole area of 9iAS and Application Server 10g administration, you can't go far wrong with the recently released Oracle Press book "Oracle Application Server 10g Administration Handbook", co-written by Don and John Garmany.
In addition to these resources, the obvious other place to look for information on 9iAS tuning is the online documentation. In particular: