Monitoring Portal Server
Expect peak loads to be four to eight times higher than the average load, but over short periods of time.
Access Manager Cache and Sessions
The performance of a portal system is affected to a large extent by the cache hit ratio of the Access Manager cache. This cache is highly tunable, but a
You can enable the amSSO and amSDKStats logs to monitor the number of active sessions on the server and the efficiency of the Directory Server cache. These logs are located by default in the /var/opt/SUNWam/debug directory. Use the com.iplanet.am.stats.interval parameter to set the logging interval. Do not use a value less than five (5) seconds. Values of 30 to 60 seconds give good output without impacting performance.
The com.iplanet.services.stats.directory parameter specifies the log location, whether to a file or to the console, and also is used to turn off the logs. You must restart the server for changes to take effect. Logs are not created until the system detects activity.
NOTE Multiple web container instances write logs to the same file.
The cache hit ratio displayed in the amSDKStats file gives both an internal value and an overall value since the server was started. Once a user logs in, the user’s session information remains in cache indefinitely or until the cache is filled up.
When the cache is full, oldest entries are removed first. If the server has not needed to remove a user’s entry, it might be the case that on a subsequent
Thread Usage
Use the web container tools to monitor the number of threads being used to service requests. In general, the number of threads actually used is generally lower than many estimates, especially in production sites where CPU utilization usually is far less than 100 percent.
Chapter 6 The Production Environment 137
