Thursday, August 20, 2009

Performance Tuning for Apache Tomcat

At SpringOne 2009, Mark Thomas gave a talk about Tomcat configuration. Mark mentions that 80% of performance problems will be in the application rather than in tomcat. Having said that, Mark shares some tomcat optimizations:

1. Logging: Turn off logging to std and only log to a file. Add rotation by limiting file size and # of file.

2. Connector Tuning: depends on application, client(web of mobile), tcp, http keep alive, and sll. Keep alive uses one tcp connection for multiple http requests. Modern pages uses over 100 requests per page. Blocking IO connectors use a thread per connection. For sticky sessions, layer 4 load balancer uses client ip and port (not always available when isps proxy user requests). Layer 7 load balancer understands http headers and tomcat puts markers for sticky session in header.

a. BIO – Java blocking connector. Stable (use as default)

b. Native (APR) – non blocking, Open SSL (use when need SSL or high concurrency with keep alive). Not stable on Solaris so use NIO instead.

c. Java non blocking IO – JSSE based SSL

Tuning:

a. MaxThreads: maximum number of concurrent requests (in BIO, it is the max number of open connections). Set to 200 – 800. Start with 400 and increase if low CPU usage or decrease with high usage

b. MaxKeepAliveRequests: Use 1 (turn off) or 100. Used to clean up and close unused requests. Disable for BIO with high concurrency, layer 4 load balancer, no ssl. Enable for ssl, APR/NIO, layer 7 load balancer. Disable if using httpd and have it on same box as tomcat

c. ConnectionTimeOut. Typical value is 3000 (3 seconds). Default of 20000 (20s) is too high. Increase for slow clients or layer 7 load balancer with connection pool and keep alive.

3. Content Cache: caches static content. Configured with CacheMaxSize in KB (10240), CacheTLL in ms(5000), CacheMaxFileSize in KB (512).


4. JVM:

a. Xmx/-Xmx used to define size of java heap. Aim to set as low as possible to leave enough space for all other processes. Setting too high can also lead to very long GC cycles. If app needs 200M set it for 250 or 300M.

b. –XX:NewSize/-XX:NewRatio set to 25%-33% of total java heap size. No need to change, but if you need to go into these details, set NewRatio over NewSize.

c. -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis –XX:MaxGCMinorPauseMillis. Goal to end up with more frequent shorter GC.

Reference: http://blog.sun.com/watt/resource/jvm-options-list.htm

5. Scaling: State management and failover. Setup cluster in httpd.conf, enable manager in httpd.conf, add sticky session in tomcat by adding unique name to jvmRoute in server.xml and then add unique route name to httpd balance member and add sticky session to proxy pass. For adding session replication, most of the time, cost of setting it up, coding for it and maintaining it is not worth it.

Mark wraps up with some hints. He recommends setting up clustering in development. He also recommends using 3 nodes instead of 2 to test load balancing and node failure to make sure load of one node is distributed equally on the remaining nodes. Mark also notes that redeployment can lead to memory leaks.


This presentation is available on InfoQ at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Tuning-Tomcat-Mark-Thomas