10. Web Application Performance

Over the last decade, the complexities of Web applications have increased tremendously. Not only are they expected to support increasingly complex features, they also are expected to handle hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of requests per day. It has become common to deploy these applications on a Java EE based Web container. To achieve optimal performance, it is important to architect the application appropriately as well as tune the container that it runs on. This chapter discusses how to monitor and tune a Web container for optimal performance as well as some of the best practices that should be used in applications.

Before diving in, a discussion about the scope of this chapter is provided. The area of high performance Web site development has been discussed at length in the literature; dozens of books have been written, thousands of blogs and articles can be found on the Web, and several Web sites are dedicated to this area. This is a vast topic that warrants that type of a comprehensive coverage. Before discussing what is covered here, to set expectations right, it is appropriate to enumerate a few topics not covered in this chapter.