By Kingsum Chow, Ph.D.

J2EE applications are required to run efficiently, even when the demand on the system is high. Improving the performance of the system is quite a complex task, within the core application and the use of the J2EE services, and also with the interaction with front-end Web servers and database back-end systems.

This article walks through an actual case study of the optimization of a J2EE application in order to illustrate best practices for developers in order to obtain high performance. The companion articles, J2EE Performance Optimization Part 1 and J2EE Performance Optimization Part 3, to this one establish the workload, performance metrics, methodology, and environment for the tuning project. This article builds on the former by providing the details of a case-study performance optimization for the SPECjAppServer family of benchmarks.