IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Tuning > Advanced tuning > Business Process Choreographer tuning > Tuning BPEL processes > Tuning long-running processes
Balancing the hardware resources
You can improve the performance of long-running BPEL processes by balancing the hardware resources.
Before starting to tune the system, verify that the computer used is well balanced, that is, that the available resources (CPU, memory and I/O) are in the correct proportions. A computer with one (or many) very fast CPUs but little memory or poor I/O performance will be hard to tune. For interruptible processes, good I/O performance provided by multiple, fast disk drives is as important as adequate processing power and sufficient memory.
For production systems, it is advisable to separate databases from application servers by using separate systems to run the database and the application server. For high load or high availability configurations, consider using a WebSphere cluster on several systems for running the BPEL processes, and a separate system for the database.
Procedure
- On the database server, make sure that you allocate enough disks.
- Allocate enough memory.
The amount of memory to allocate depends on the platform:
- For a 32-bit Windows system with 4 GB of physical memory and a local database management system, use the following memory allocation:
- 512 MB for Windows systems
- 768 MB for WebSphere Application Server
- 1.5 GB for the database if you are using DB2 . If you are using Oracle, no more than 1 GB for the System Global Area (SGA) and 500 MB for the Program Global Area (PGA).
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For a 64-bit AIX system with 8 GB of physical memory and a local database management system, use the following memory allocation:
- 512 MB for AIX systems
- 1024 MB for WebSphere Application Server
- 5 GB for the database. Allocate 4 GB for the process database and 1 GB for the messaging database or databases.
Tip: To help ensure optimum performance, do not allocate all memory to the database, because the file caching, for example, also consumes memory. Avoid situations in which data must be swapped to disk because insufficient memory is available.
- Fine-tune the heap size of the application server.
- For a 32-bit Windows system with 4 GB of physical memory and a local database management system, use the following memory allocation:
- Observe the network utilization. The performance of applications also depends on the speed that messages can pass between the servers and the database server. Where possible, reduce latency in the network.
- Move workload to other servers.
Consider which applications or subsystems can be moved to other servers.
Results
Your computer hardware is now well balanced.
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