Chapter 1: The Need for Performance

Overview

Sometimes, people take decreasing hardware and infrastructure costs for granted. System managers typically neglect that to better an application's overall performance (reducing end user - facing response times), it's just as important to look at the way something is configured or tuned than it is to add horsepower (hardware) to your platform.

For WebSphere-based Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications, this is an important concept to understand. Poorly performing applications that are simply masked by ultra -fast hardware will undoubtedly be, from a resource utilization point of view, the catalyst for other problems in the future.

This chapter presents several models that exist to help system and application managers understand and appreciate the financial gains and the business benefits from a well-optimized and correctly scaled environment.