Chapter 14: Profiling and Benchmarking WebSphere


In this chapter, you'll look at how to profile WebSphere and applications operating under WebSphere. I already discussed how to monitor WebSphere to optimize it, but in this chapter, you'll peer through the other end of the looking glass at the art of benchmarking.

Profiling and Benchmarking, Revisited

Profiling is all about measuring a component of a system, commonly against a predefined set of measures. For example, you may go out one day and purchase a whiz-bang new home stereo system. After bringing it home, you want to crank it up and hear how it sounds. Before you do that, you want to make sure your neighbors won't be knocking on your door complaining about the noise, so you pick a spot outside your house to listen to the music at various levels.

Over the course of an afternoon, you play your sample music and run out-side to listen to the noise level. Each time, you go back into the living room and crank up the music one extra notch . You do this until you feel the music is too loud for your neighbors, and you (sadly) mark that spot on the amplifier volume dial.

In a sense, this is profiling . You're attempting to profile different levels of music (statistical data) and its effect on your neighbors. If, however, you were trying to see how loud your stereo would go, this would be a form of benchmarking . Benchmarking is the measurement of performance for a particular component (for example, an application, a disk drive, a processor, or a stereo).

Profiling and benchmarking an application aren't that different. Essentially, profiling an application is about statistically analyzing various subcomponents, sometimes against pre-existing baseline measurements or, other times, simply to obtain statistical data about how the application measures up. Application benchmarking, on the other hand, is when you want to understand how the application performs .




Maximizing Performance and Scalability with IBM WebSphere
Maximizing Performance and Scalability with IBM WebSphere
ISBN: 1590591305
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 111
Authors: Adam G. Neat

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