BEA WebLogic Server Tuning Guide

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1.0 Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to discuss configuration guidelines, development best practices, and tuning information
for BEA WebLogic Server for HP NonStop™ servers. This document builds on experience configuring clusters with
up to 60 instances running on four 16-CPU HP NonStop servers, as well as on documents
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, white papers, FAQs
available from BEA on WebLogic Server, and information from several technical resources in BEA and HP NonStop
Professional Services who provided valuable insight into the product.
This document is composed of the following topics:
• Information about several WebLogic Server features, as background for configuration guidelines
• NonStop server-specific configuration guidelines for Connection pooling, Statement caching, and
management of Thread Count and the XA Resource Manager
• Fault tolerance and performance considerations
Discussions in this paper are based on WebLogic Server 8.1 SP3 as deployed on a NonStop server, though
externals for later versions (and possible changes that can affect NonStop server deployments) are provided in
some instances. Information on NonStop server functionality refers to functionality in the G06.20 or later operating
system versions, which are certified by BEA for use with BEA WebLogic Server.
2.0 Background Information
WebLogic Server is an application server—a platform for developing and deploying multi-tier distributed enterprise
applications. WebLogic Server centralizes application services such as Web server functionality, business
components, and access to backend enterprise systems. It also provides enterprise-level security and administration
facilities.
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WebLogic Server implements J2EE, the Java Enterprise standard, which includes the Java programming language
as well as J2EE component technologies for developing distributed objects. The WebLogic Server architecture
consists of three tiers:
• A client tier, which contains programs executed by users such as web browsers and network-capable
application programs.
• A middle tier, with servers addressed directly by clients such as WebLogic Server, other web servers,
firewalls, and proxy servers that mediate traffic between clients and WebLogic Server.
• A backend tier, with enterprise resources such as database management systems (DBMS), mainframe
applications, transaction monitors, and packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
The rest of this section provides background material for configuring BEA WebLogic Server on HP NonStop servers.
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http://dev2dev.bea.com is an excellent resource on WebLogic Server. The FAQs are located at http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/faq/index.html
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Information in these paragraphs is from BEA product information. For further information about BEA WebLogic Server architecture, see http://edocs.bea.com/.