HP-UX TCP/IP Performance White Paper, March 2008

4 Improving HP-UX Server Performance

4.1 Tuning Application and Database Servers

Many of the enterprise applications today are architected and built using the J2EE framework, which is

designed for the mainframe-scale computing typical of large enterprises. The J2EE framework provides a

way to architect solutions which are distributed, multi-tiered and scalable. The diagram below shows an

overview of the multi-tiered J2EE application architecture.

In such an architecture, the client tier typically consists of web browsers or traditional terminals used at

point of sales etc. In a typical deployment, web and business tiers are either separate or may be hosted

within a single physical server. Application servers normally run business logic of an enterprise and they

communicate with backend database servers using application programming interfaces such as the Java

Database Connectivity (JDBC) interfaces.

Though both web servers and application servers can be hosted on a single physical server, the often used

practice is to separate them and run them on different physical servers for better performance and

scalability of applications. In an actual deployment, there may be components such as a network load

balancer which will help balance the load among multiple application servers and/or web servers. The

diagram on the next page shows a typical physical view of such a deployment.

Web Server

App Servers

DB Server

Enterprise Data Center

Internet

Web Clients

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Internet