By Kingsum Chow, Ph.D

The popularity of the J2EE* platform and Java* application servers enables rapid application development and deployment. Many developers have now moved to build their applications using commercially available J2EE application servers such as BEA WebLogic* Server, IBM WebSphere* Application Server, and Oracle Application Server*.

This article establishes the workload, performance metrics, methodology, and environment for a tuning project based on the SPECjAppServer family of benchmarks. The companion articles, J2EE Performance Optimization, Part 2 and J2EE Performance Optimization, Part 3 include the actual case study of an optimization based on the measures established in this article. The study uses a four-way application server based on Itanium® processors running the BEA WebLogic application server and the JRockit* JVM under Windows*.