WebLogic Optimizations for RMI

The BEA WebLogic Application Server has implemented optimizations for RMI to greatly increase performance. As mentioned in the first section of this chapter, communication with Enterprise Java Beans is performed with RMI. The optimizations implemented by WebLogic are focused on increasing performance when the client and EJBs are running on the same WebLogic Application Server. It is actually very common to have the servlet call an EJB that is running on the same server. When the application server identifies the collocation of the client and implementation object, it skips the RMI infrastructure and calls the methods directly. This technique is known as collocation optimization . Avoiding the marshaling of data has dramatic impact on increasing performance.

Under standard operation, when a remote method is called, each of the parameters are serialized, written across the socket, read by the server, and deserialized. This is extremely time consuming. The WebLogic collocation optimizations avoid this by calling the method directly when the client and server are hosted by the same application server.