Managing Transactions

Troubleshooting

Application Performs Poorly

My EJB application runs too slowly and I don't know where to start in trying to speed it up.

Knowing what part of an application to focus on is key to improving its performance. First you need to determine which operations are the slowest, which you can do simply by executing the methods exposed by your session beans. You can also get information on this using some of the tools described in the chapter that follows on stress testing. Once you have a particular operation to focus on, it's important to assess how much of its workload is actual processing and how much is database access. Once you know this, it's easier to start proposing changes to how the operation is implemented. The main guideline to remember in addressing performance is a simple one ”be sure you know where the bottlenecks in a system are before you implement any optimizations.