Monitoring Portal Server

Monitoring Portal Server

This section describes the variables that affect portal performance, as well as the portal monitoring you can perform. Areas to monitor include:

Sun Java System Access Manager

Portal Desktop

Sun Java System Directory Server

Java Virtual Machine

While emerging technologies enable you to perform detailed monitoring of Portal Server services, this section focuses on the basic but extensive set of hardware and software issues that determine the overall performance of a portal deployment.

Specifically, portal performance is determined by the capability of throughput and latency over a period of time. You must conduct a baseline performance analysis as soon as possible. The baseline performance analysis confirms that your portal substantially conforms to published performance numbers. Establishing a performance baseline helps you to understand infrastructure issues that can severely impact the performance of a production portal.

Nevertheless, when maintaining a properly performing portal, you must look at a broad set of issues. The following sections explain issues in terms of portal performance variables and provides guidelines for determining portal efficiency.

NOTE These rules also apply for performance, scalability, and stress tests.

Memory Consumption and Garbage Collection

Before reading this section, read the following document on tuning garbage collection with the Java Virtual Machine, version 1.4.2:

http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/index.html

Portal Server requires substantial amounts of memory to provide the highest possible throughput. At initialization, a maximum address space is virtually reserved but does not allocate physical memory unless needed. The complete address space reserved for object memory can be divided into the young and old generations.

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Sun Microsystems 2005Q1 manual Monitoring Portal Server, Memory Consumption and Garbage Collection