J2EE performance and scalability-from measuring to predicting

Abstract

J2EE applications are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and with their increasing adoption, performance and scalability issues are gaining in importance. For a J2EE application to perform well and be scalable, both the platform on which it is built and the application design must be efficient and scalable. Industry-standard benchmarks such as the SPECjAppServer set of benchmarks help to evaluate the performance and scalability of alternative platforms for J2EE applications, however, they cannot be used to evaluate the performance and scalability of concrete applications built on the selected platforms. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for evaluating and predicting the performance and scalability of J2EE applications based on modeling and simulation. The approach helps to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the application design and ensure that systems are designed and sized to meet their quality of service requirements. We introduce our approach by showing how it can be applied to the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark which is used as a representative J2EE application. A detailed model of a SPECjAppServer2004 deployment is built in a step-by-step fashion and then used to predict the behavior of the system under load. The approach is validated by comparing model predictions against measurements on the real system.