Webservice performance tips

WebSphere-World

WebSphere SAML

A great article from google on SAML
Google article that explains SAML interactions in a very nice way.

WebSphere SAML articles
Some interesting reads on SAML with WebSphere.....

SAML SSO Summary

ConfigureSAMLSSOPartners

Enable SAML SSO

WebSphere Security Token Service

This article describes WebSphere support for being a token service - which Websphere calls the Trust Service.  Note though WebSphere Application Server token provider support is limited to the Security Context Token provider - the application server does not provide a full security token service that implements all the contents of the WS-Trust specification.

A security context needs to be created and shared by the communicating parties before being used. A security context is shared among the communicating parties for the lifetime of a communications session and a security context token is the wire representation of this abstract security context.

WebSphere Application Server does not support a security context token created by one of the communicating parties and propagated with a messageWebSphere Application Server does not support creating a security context token through negotiation and exchanges.
article

This article describes WebSphere support for Browser Web SSO Profile that is now supported in 7.0.0.23, 8.0.0.4 and 8.5 versions.
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WAS v8 SAML Features:
article


WAS v7 SAML Features:
article1
article2 

Article on how to avoid identity mapping when using SAML identity propagation
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Using SAML support in WebSphere Application Server Version 7.0 Fix Pack 7 with Tivoli Federated Identity Manager Version 6.2.0

Generate WAS Heap Dump

• Find a JVM objectName:

   set objectName [$AdminControl queryNames 
  WebSphere:type=JVM,process=<servername>,node=<nodename>,*]  

• Invoke the generateHeapDump operation on JVM MBean:

   $AdminControl invoke $objectName generateHeapDump

Websphere 64bit performance tuning

WebSphere 64bit performance tuning considerations

WAS 64bit Performance guide

WAS 64bit FAQ

IHS Performance Tuning

IHS Performance tuning needs to be carefully considered to ensure environments can be loaded succesfully

Review this article to ensure the number of client connections to websphere are correctly managed.

Review this article to tune ihs.

Review this article to understand IHS Plugin Loadbalancing

Ihs config

nix environment running slowly?

nmon
nmon is a tool that is useful for performance monitoring nix based environments.  Checkout nmon to determine your performance issues.

nmon output can be saved to file and later analyzed using the nmon excel spreadsheet tool

This line line captures the top processes and creates an output file in the current directory called: Â Â Â Â

nmon -fT -s 30 -c 120

The tool can be downloaded here tool

Memory
If you think you have a memory issue; then checkout this article on how linux consumes memory.  What is interesting is that nmon and top show you 'free' memory.  But it does not mean what you think....it really is free memory, but it doesnt mean that is the only available memory.   nix systems use disk caching to make disk access faster; but this memory is still free for applications to 'take over'.

Linux Performance Tuning Redbook pg 13:
The default configuration of the virtual memory manager allocates all available free memory space as disk cache. Hence it is not unusual to see productive Linux systems that boast gigabytes of memory but only have 20 MB of that memory free.
Also have a look at how memory is being consumed by the Java Process with this article


Linux Performance Tuning Redbook pg 35:
This value depicts the amount of swap space used. As described in 1.2.2, “Virtual memory manager” on page 12, swap usage only tells you that Linux manages memory really efficiently. Swap In/Out is a reliable means of identifying a memory bottleneck. Values above 200 to 300 pages per second for a sustained period of time express a likely memory bottleneck.

• Run the tests for Measuring native heap usage in the article
• Remember though that the resident set size may reflect memory that is being referenced by more than one process. SHR reflects the shared memory size.
• Free -m is the best way to understand how much memory is available.  Look at the +/- buffers cache free column.  This is what can be taken from the cache and used.

Thanks for the memory

The article uses a very simple command to determine the RSS.

ps -p $PID -o pid,vsz,rss

There is a script that can be run to capture a processes native memory utilisation, which can be later analyzed using IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java - Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer from within IBM Support Assistant.

Large Page Support
Have a look at using large page support with this article

• use cat /proc/meminfo to determine the system page settings

Review the Linux monitoring commands
The following blog reports the linux monitoring commands

Other articles
articles performance tuning v7 and 8

liberty performance tuning article

Linux performance tuning redbook

Cookies hijacked

The perfect CRIME? New HTTPS web hijack attack explained • The Register

Strict https

HTTP Strict Transport Security - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

lparstat - find out how many cpus in your system

using the lparstat command you can determine your systems configuration, including the cpu configuration.

AIX Virtual CPUs

Interesting article on vCPU sizings: