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Determining Capacity Requirements
The following sections provide information on how to determine your capacity requirements:
Examining Results from a Baseline Application
WebLogic Server development has produced some baseline capacity planning results as a starting point. These baseline numbers were generated using a typical customer application from the online banking industry. You can compare the parameters of the baseline configurations to your configuration, and use this information to help estimate your capacity requirements.
Characteristics of the Baseline Application
This application implements standard operations from the banking industry including entity beans for database information, and JSPs (servlets) for presentation. This application was designed to be representative of an actual customer application, but by design, no real optimization has been done on the application itself. This qualifies this application as a "poorly designed" application.
This list summarizes the characteristics of the baseline application:
BEA Systems ran the application on the WebLogic Server on two types of machines: Windows NT and HP-UX. If you are looking for capacity planning guidelines for Windows NT, use the Windows NT numbers as your baseline. If you are running on Solaris or another UNIX, use HP-UX as your baseline.
Note: Solaris and other UNIX platform numbers should be similar to those on HP-UX.
Note: THE BASELINE NUMBERS LISTED HERE ARE NOT BENCHMARKS, AND THEY ARE NOT COUNTS OF TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND. THEY SHOULD NOT BE CONFUSED WITH COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKS. The baseline numbers are conservative baselines based on a poorly designed WebLogic Application on a poorly configured WebLogic Server. A number of benchmarks show how a well-designed application can perform on WebLogic Server. These benchmarks are available from BEA Systems. For more information, contact your BEA Systems sales representative.
For Windows NT, tests were run using a 1-4way Windows NT 4.0 machine with 4 PIII 450Mhz Xeon chips as the server, and standard PC machines as clients.
Note: THE BASELINE NUMBERS LISTED HERE ARE NOT BENCHMARKS AND THEY ARE NOT A COUNT OF TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND. DO NOT USE THEM AS COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKS. The baseline numbers are conservative, baseline numbers based on a poorly designed WebLogic Server application on a poorly configured WebLogic Server. A number of benchmarks show how a well-designed application can perform on WebLogic. These benchmarks are available from BEA Systems. For more information, contact your BEA Systems sales representative.
For UNIX (HP-UX 11.0), tests were run using a 1-6way HP-UX 11 machine with 1-6 PA-RISC chips and standard PC machines as clients.
Generating Capacity Planning Requirements
Reprising our 1000-user example from How Many Transactions Must Run Concurrently? the configuration is running 1000 simultaneous users. Given the details that we found in this example, you can conclude that it will scale similarly to the baseline numbers. This example does not differentiate substantially from the baseline configuration. Therefore, a cluster of 2 4-CPU Windows NT boxes or a 6-CPU box will likely do the job.
For your application, take the information that you know from Examining Results from a Baseline Application to see how your application differs from the baseline application. If, for example, the only difference is that you are doing all SSL connections and running on Windows NT, you should expect that you will see 66% less than with the baseline numbers. Do that same logical process for all of the factors listed in Capacity Planning Factors to Consider.
Lastly, remember that 99.9% of applications are not well implemented or designed. Take the hardware configuration that you developed in the previous paragraph and double it.
Now, you should be ready to deploy your application with a good idea as to system capacity. Remember! TEST the capacity of your system BEFORE relying on it for production deployments.
This section is a summary of FAQs related to information in this guide.
What About Mainframes or Other Types of Hardware? How to Determine Capacity Planning Information for Those systems?
It should be relatively simple. Look at the mainframe as a multiple of many individual PCs. For example an E10000 from Sun is a 64-way machine. A conservative estimate would be to look at that machine as being as powerful as 64 individual PCs.
What About Heterogeneous Client Types? For Example, Programmatic AND http Clients?
When in doubt, assume the worst. In this case, assume that 100% of the clients will be http clients and develop your capacity planning numbers appropriately.
How Do I Get My Application To Run Faster?
You will want to tune your WebLogic Server first, using the tuning guide included in BEA Systems documentation. Second, consider using a tuning tool such as jProbe from sitraka, formerly KL Group, at http://www.sitraka.com to find bottlenecks in the code. Also, check the latest in the WebLogic Server documentation and customer support FAQs to see up-to-date application tuning and design guides.
What About AIX, Linux, or Other UNIX?
You can expect similar performance across the multiple UNIX-type variants available. However, you should note that some of the UNIX-type operating systems supported by WebLogic Server do not have performance packs.
How Do I Determine How Much Memory I Need?
BEA Systems recommends that you install a minimum of 256 MB of memory for each WebLogic Server that will be handling more than minimal capacity. If you are expecting a very heavy load, BEA Systems recommends that you increase your memory substantially.
For information on memory requirements, see the BEA WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning Guide.
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