One of the things that is a constant surprise is finding clients with slow Java systems that spend a tonne of cash on new hardware but don’t configure their systems to make full use of it.  A classic problem is leaving the application server settings as per first install, with very low JVM heap size and a poor garbage collector, another problem being running only one instance of a JVM, a situation where you may have a new server with 4GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU but running the software in only 512MB RAM with threading likely to be tied to a single core.

Sceneric consultants are experts at optimising our clients platforms to ensure the hardware is properly utilised.  Our consultants have deployed applications on clustered IBM Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle iAS and JBoss servers, and have created Coldfusion Enterprise clusters on JRun 4.0 leading to significant performance and stability gains.

The key thing to remember is that Java runs within a virtual machine which has limits ordinarily significantly smaller than the avialable hardware.   Without explicit tuning expertise applied, the applications running within the virutal machine will not be performing to their optimum potential.

Tags: best practice, clustering, hardware, heap, Hosting, Java, JVM, optimisation, performance, stability