Sizing : Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction

OracleAS Portal meets the three critical requirements for scaling performance:

• The underlying architecture is cross-platform, allowing the portal to take advantage of the full range of available hardware resources. Portal administrators can choose the best platform for each portal component, allowing optimization of both performance and total cost of ownership.
• The architecture supports load distribution and parallel execution of portal components across multiple servers.
• The portal implements intelligent caching of dynamically generated portal pages. Intelligent caching ensures that information remains fresh and timely while minimizing the cost of regenerating content from databases and back-end services. Intelligent caching supports user-level customizations and is also modular, so that entire pages or just page components can be stored in a cache and refreshed as necessary. Finally, intelligent caching protects security by ensuring that cached content is only accessible by authorized users.

At the heart of the OracleAS Portal architecture is the Parallel Page Engine, a multithreaded Servlet deployed on OracleAS Containers for J2EE (OC4J), Oracle's highly scalable J2EE framework. Multiple Parallel Page Engines deployed in a server farm work together to retrieve content from portlet providers, manage caching, and assemble and deliver pages.

OracleAS Portal is also fully integrated with OracleAS Web Cache, Oracle's patented caching technology. Unlike legacy cache servers, which only handle static data, OracleAS Web Cache combines caching, compression and assembly technologies to accelerate the delivery of both static and dynamically generated Portal content. OracleAS Web Cache also provides back-end Web server load balancing, failover and surge protection features which ensure blazing performance and rock-solid up-time. With OracleAS Web Cache, OracleAS Portal can now serve rich content faster, to more users, using fewer computing resources than ever before.

Without the unique combination of caching and scalability features offered by OracleAS Portal, it would be impossible to scale a portal site in a cost-effective manner. OracleAS Portal's architecture truly minimizes the hardware resources required to deploy a high-traffic portal.

Measuring the scalability of a portal requires for there to be common denominator, in the case of Database performance metrics we can refer to TPCC benchmarks. For J2EE application server performance we can refer to 'Pet Store' transaction figures. Unfortunately there is no 'Pet Store' for Portals, until the true unification of portal development and deployment standards through the efforts of JSR168, WSRP and other open portal development standards, it will be impossible to develop a Portal Pet Store because of the variety of implementation methods employed by the portal vendors in the marketplace.

This document provides links to documents related directly to questions you may have about the sizing, performance and scalability of OracleAS Portal.

Common Sizing, Performance and Monitoring Questions

How do I estimate the hardware I will need to run the portal ?

You can read Sizing OracleAS Portal - An Introduction , which will explain the things that need to be considered when estimating the hardware you'll need to deploy a portal solution.

Having read the sizing overview, you can see if your portal requirements fit these sample architectures

Do you have any examples of existing portal implementations ?

Currently we have two detailed examples that you can read about. We are working on delivering more real world examples that have hardware and performance specifications

I have a running portal, but sometimes it's slow, how do I find out which parts are causing this ?

You need to run the performance scripts, get them from PortalCenter or from

Performance Monitoring with modPLSQL in OracleAS Portal  

I have installed the performance scripts - what do they actually tell me ?

Lots of things  !

You can read about the sort of things these reports are telling you by reading

Object Access Reporting from the Performance Logs in OracleAS Portal  

My portal is cool ! I'd like to tell Oracle all about it...

Great, we'd love to hear about it.

What other forms of monitoring are available for my portal ?

• Administer and Monitor Your Portal with Oracle Enterprise Manager (40049)   - this whitepaper describes how a portal administrator can take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager features such as collections, automatic notifications, historical metric reports, application modeling and application performance monitoring. We will show how to configure and interpret diagnostic logging information by using the powerful new Oracle Enterprise Manager Log Viewer for automatic correlation of these logs.  

You can also read the following technotes for further monitoring advice:

How do I know what is being invalidated in Web Cache ?

Good question, you can find out by reading Managing Cache Invalidation with OracleAS Portal  This is important if you are seeing slow performance from invalidations or perhaps stale content that you'd like to invalidate manually

I've heard about this thing called TCP.NODELAY - what is it ?

It's a parameter that 'may' improve the performance of your portal installation - you can read more about it in Tuning Oracle Net Services to optimize modPLSQL Database access times  

What sort of settings should I change to tune the portal ?

Ideally, the portal installation should provide you with reasonable performance out of the box, but if you feel the need to adjust elements of the OracleAS Portal installation then the following papers will assist you

• Tips and Techniques for Deploying a Scalable Portal (40048)   - this whitepaper describes the unique OracleAS Portal features that enable scalable performance, focusing on the process used to generate, assemble, secure, and cache personalized portal pages.
• Configuring Session Cache for Performance  

I've got some questions about sizing and performance - who do I ask ?

You should ask them on the forums, specifically the Performance Forum or if it's related to caching performance and or strategies, you can ask it on the Web Cache Forum

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