This topic describes the benefits of tuning for optimal performance, highlights the tunable parameters of the major WebSphere Application Server components, and provides insight about how these parameters affect performance. WebSphere Application Server provides tunable settings for its major components to enable you to make adjustments to better match the runtime environment to the characteristics of your application. Many applications can run successfully without any changes to the default values for these tuning parameters. Other applications might need changes, for example, a larger heap size, to achieve optimal performance.
Performance tuning can yield significant gains in performance even if an application is not optimized for performance. However, correcting shortcomings of an application typically results in larger performance gains than are possible with just altering tuning parameters. Many factors contribute to a high performing application.
Additional references: