Websphere PMI: enabling and viewing data

For those who ever needed to have a deeper look at application internals that may be impacting performance probably had this impression:

System.out.println with System.nanoTime (or currentTimeMillis) is tedious, errorprone and limited

A profiler is an overkill not to mention cumbersome (and unavailable for certain platforms [eg.:tptp on AIX]*)

This is the scenario where Websphere PMI is a killer feature.

Imagine that your application isn’t performing as expected. Many can be the reasons for the poor performance. I’ve faced myself a scenario where the application was waiting a long time for getting a JMS connection from Websphere internal provider since its default configuration of 10 connections maximum isn’t acceptable for any application with performance requirements of even 100 transactions per second.

Enabling PMI

By default, Websphere 6.1 ND comes with basic PMI metrics enabled. These include for example:

• Enterprise Beans.Create Count
• JDBC Connection Pools.Wait Time
• JDBC Connection Pools.Use Time

If you need anything more than the default, you can change under:

Monitoring and Tuning > Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI)

then click on the desired server.

After you have chosen the desired metrics (remember that more metrics involve more CPU impact on runtime), go to the following menu:

Monitoring and Tuning > Performance Viewer > Current Activity

Now you need to check if your server is in fact already collecting data, if it is already enabled but not collecting, Collection Status will show Available. In order to start collecting, check the desired server and click Start Monitoring button. After clicking the button it will now show Monitored on the status column.

Now you can click on the desired server and tick for example one of your connection pools under the tree on the left, you should see an structure similar to the below:

Performance Modules > JDBC Connection Pools > Oracle XA Provider > yourDataSource

After clicking the metric you’ll have a graph display of the current data and also a tabular with the snapshot of the indicator below.

* note: Eclipse TPTP is said to be supported on AIX on version 4.3.1 but I have not been able to make it work

WebSphere Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI)

For the next weeks I’ll be posting some feedback about my experience on using WebSphere PMI tool. It is an incredible tool for performance tuning. Basically it frees you from plugging a CPU intensive profiler (that is also usually hard to setup) and lets you see (for example) performance data such as waiting and use time for connections inside a pool. Still there are cases when you need to see information in bits as it is available on a profiling tool such as Eclipse TPTP.

JCA posts have been updated, I have made some changes about ManagedConnections and Connection Handles interaction in the Foo Connector. For those who have read the previous version of the post I suggest re-reading it.

Still on the performance topic there is one phrase atributed to Donald Knuth that is worth mentioning:

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” (Knuth, Donald. Structured Programming with go to Statements, ACM Journal Computing Surveys, Vol 6, No. 4, Dec. 1974. p.268.) Wikipedia – Optimization