Oracle9iAS Portal Developer Services
An Overview of Oracle9iAS Portal Performance

Introduction

An enterprise portal needs to provide information to all its users at high speed and needs to maintain high performance to support manifold growth in users and content. Oracle9iAS Portal provides an infrastructure that is highly scalable and supports a distributable platform.  

Enhance the performance of your portal by ensuring that you leverage performance capabilities across the various components of your portal:  

• add caching to your code (expires-based, validation-based, invalidation-based),
• distribute load using remote Web Providers and Federated Web Adapter
• enable Web Cache,
• enable Oracle9iS Portal performance monitoring,
• fine-tune Oracle Net Services, 
• troubleshoot Oracle9i Application Server performance. 

This document describes the various ways you can enhance your portal's performance and provides links to additional resources for the various alternatives.

Enhance Code Performance 

Oracle9iAS Portal provides three ways to enable caching in coded portlets:  

• Expires based Caching
• Validation based Caching
• Invalidation based Caching

Expires based caching uses a given expiration period to use the cache for rendering the portlet. Validation based caching method compares a key value to check whether the cache is still valid.  If the key value doesn't change, it uses the cached content otherwise it makes a round trip to the Portal node to fetch the portlet content.

Another very flexible caching mechanism that combines the best features of expiry and validation caching is Invalidation based caching. Invalidation based caching is essentially expires based caching, with the added ability to "expire" or "invalidate" the contents of the cache at any time. Invalidation of cache content is usually triggered by some kind of "event" taking place. 

To learn more about the various caching alternatives, read these PDK articles:

• Adding Caching to J2EE portlets 
• A Primer on Caching 
• Implementing Validation based Caching (PL/SQL)
• Implementing Expires based Caching (PL/SQL)
• Setting up Invalidation based Caching Sample 
• Creating a URL based portlet that uses Invalidation caching

Distribute Load 

Oracle9iAS Portal provides a web provider framework that allows you to build remote providers, thereby allowing you to deploy your portlets from remote servers. You can organize your portlets under different providers, and your providers under different provider groups, and thus distribute load across multiple servers. A provider group facilitates simplified registration of the providers it contains. For database providers, you can use the PL/SQL HTTP adapter (now known as the Federated Web Adapter) to deploy database portlets remotely.

• Primer on Web Providers
• Understanding Provider Groups
• Understanding the Federated Web Adapter
• Building remote database portlets

Tune Oracle9iAS Portal

Oracle9iAS Portal's architecture and infrastructure supports high performance and high scalability. To learn more about the features that enable scalable performance, and the process used to generate, assemble, and cache personalized portal pages, read this white paper on Oracle9iAS Portal's Architecture for Scalability.

Configure Oracle9iAS Portal for Performance

The Oracle9iAS Portal Configuration Guide guide contains many useful chapters pointers on configuring your portal and associated services. You can learn about advanced configuration options, Web Cache tuning and some rudimentary OHS tuning. 

Enable Web Cache 

Using Oracle9iAS Web Cache, you can benefit simultaneously from improved response times and lower infrastructure costs. You can leverage Oracle9iAS Web Cache to serve rich content faster, to more users, using fewer computing resources than ever before. 

• Understanding how Oracle9iAS Portal uses Web Cache 
• Enhance Portal 3.0.9 Performance with Web Cache 
• Additional Web Cache documentation on OTN 

Performance Monitoring in Oracle9iAS Portal 

Oracle9iAS Portal provides a performance logging service where information about every web request is tracked. Read this Technical Note to understand how to configure performance monitoring and reporting.

Fine-tune Oracle Net Services

This Technical Note provides guidelines for optimizing modPLSQL database access times. This document tells you how to enable modplsql performance logging, SQL*Net tuning option, example configurations and further references.

Object Access Reporting from Performance Logs

Understand how to leverage built-in reporting on various commonly required performance reports by reading this Technical Note. These reports execute against the data collected by the performance logging service of mod_plsql.

Additional Technical Notes:

• How do I access Oracle9iAS Portal and modPLSQL Dynamic Monitoring Service 
• How do I interpret Oracle9iAS modPLSQL Dynamic Monitoring Service
• How do I add additional Oracle9iAS Portal and Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On Targets to the Enterprise Manager Web Site
• Using Cost Based Optimization for Oracle9iAS Portal 
• Troubleshooting Issues in Oracle9iAS Portal Architecture & Performance
• Configuring Session Cache for Performance

Tune Oracle9i Application Server

Oracle HTTP Server Administration Guide 
This document explains in-depth some of the features you can tune to improve the performance of the Oracle HTTP Server

Oracle9i Application Server Performance Guide 
This document targets performance related tuning and troubleshooting across the complete 9iAS product stack. Whilst not dealing explicitly with portal related issues, it does give an excellent opportunity to understand the component architecture and the tuning opportunities available.  

Oracle9i Application Server Administrator's Guide 
All the necessary steps required to manage your 9iAS instance are documented here. 

Summary

Performance is a critical consideration for your portal's success. You can ensure high performance of your enterprise portal by utilizing the various performance related features of Oracle9iAS Portal. If your portal's performance is an issue, turn on the performance monitoring, and locate what the most time-consuming activity is. Accordingly, you need to tune the performance of that component - be it a portlet, a provider, the mid-tier, the portal configuration or the application server configuration.