Portal 6.1.5 Basic Tuning

WebSphere_Portal Heap Size

Parameter	AIX POWER5	Linux	Solaris	Windows 2003	z/Linux	z/OS
Initial and Maximum heap size (Mbytes)	1792	2048	3584	1408	3584	2048

Start with a heap size of 1024 in case the portal application is not too memory intensive. If portlets are caching a lot of data then start with 1200/1400.


In the Session Timeout field, select Set Timeout. Default session timeout is 30.

Parameter	AIX POWER5	Linux	Solaris	Windows 2003	z/Linux	z/OS
Session timeout	10 minutes	10 minutes	12 minutes	10 minutes	10 minutes	10 minutes

Web Container Thread Pool Size

Servlet engine thread pool size: Set this value and monitor the results. Increase this value if all the servlet threads are busy most of the time.

Setting the parameters: In the WebSphere Application Server Administration Console, select Servers > Application Servers > WebSphere Portal > Additional Properties: Thread Pools > Web Container.

In the General Properties section, set the thread pool size in the following fields:
Minimum size threads
Maximum size threads.

Parameter	AIX POWER5	Linux	Solaris	Windows 2003	z/Linux	z/OS
Web container thread pool size	50	50	50	50	50	50

GC policy is gencon for AIX, and set following property for it:
Servers > Application Servers > WebSphere Portal > Server Infrastructure: Java and Process Management > Process Definition > Java Virtual Machine.

In the Generic JVM Arguments field, add the following: –Xmn256m

Security Attribute Propagation

 

To reduce the Security Attribute Propagation (SAP) overhead, use the following custom property: disable Callerlist. If you do not use SAP, then ensure it is disabled to remove the extra overhead, which improves login performance.

If Subject has not been customized, then there is no need to enable Security Attribute Propagation. Security Attribute Propagation can add extra overhead due to some extra processing that is required. However, there are certain configurations where performance might be better with security propagation enabled due to reduction of remote registry calls. See the WebSphere Portal 6.1 InfoCenter (use the following search terms: security attribute propagation) for a discussion of when propagating security attributes is desirable. If you want to enable SAP for functional reasons, you can improve the performance with CallerList tuning described as follows.
Note: The following settings apply to all platforms.

Setting the parameters: In the WebSphere Application Server Administration Console, select Security > Secure Administration, Applications, and Infrastructure > Custom properties.

Table 2: WebSphere Security Attribute Propagation Settings

Name	Value
com.ibm.CSI.disablePropagationCallerList	true
com.ibm.CSI.rmiOutboundPropagationEnabled	false
com.ibm.CSI.rmiInboundPropagationEnabled	false
com.ibm.ws.security.WebInboundPropagationEnabled	false

For com.ibm.CSI.disablePropagationCallerList, create a new property. For the other properties, change their values to false.

     
          poolWaitTime="3000" prefPoolSize="10"/>

Table 3: VMM Context Pool Setting

Context Pool Setting	Default Value	Value
initPoolSize	1	10
prefPoolSize	3	30Number of open connections to maintain to LDAP server.
maxPoolSize	20	0A value of 0 allows the pool to grow as large as needed. If access to the LDAP server is shared by many systems, this setting may allow an excessive number of connections to the LDAP server; in such a case, set the maximum pool size to a value appropriate to your environment.

5/10/20 is a good value to begin with for above values.