Berkay's questions

Oracle Application Server Performance Monitoring and Tuning (CPU load high)

i have just hired by a company and my boss give me a performance issue to solve as soon as possible. I don't have any experience with the Java EE before at the server side.

Let me begin what i learned about the system and still couldn't find the solution:

We have an Oracle Application Server (10.1.) and Oracle Database server (9.2.), the software guys wrote a kind of big J2EE project (X project) using specifically JSF 1.2 with Ajax which is only used in this project. They actively use PL/SQL in their code.

So, we started the application server (Solaris machine), everything seems OK. users start using the app starting Monday from different locations (app 200 have user accounts,i just checked and see that the connection pool is set right, the session are active only 15 minutes).

After sometime (2 days) CPU utilization gets high,%60, at night it is still same nothing changed (the online user amount is nearly 1 or 2 at this time), even it starts using the CPU allocated for other applications on the same server because they freed If we don't restart the server, the utilization becomes %90 following 2 days, application is so slow that end users starts calling.

The main problem is software engineers say that code is clear, and the System and DBA managers say that we have the correct configuration,the other applications seems OK why this problem happens only for X application.

I start copying the DB to a test platform and upgrade it to the latest version, also did in same with the application server (Weblogic) if there is a bug or not. i only tested by myself only one user and weblogic admin panel i can track the threads and dump them. ı noticed that there are some threads showing as a hogging. when i checked the manuals and control the trace i see that it directs me the line number where PL/SQL code is called from a .java file. The software eng. says that yes we have really complex PL/SQL codes but what's the relation with Application server? this is the problem of DB server, i guess they're right...

I know the question has many holes, i'd like to give more in detail but i appreciate the way you guide me.

Thanks in advance ...

Edit: The server both in CPU and Memory enough to run more complex applications

i want to know much about port numbers used by source (clients) and destination (servers). Can clients get any port number or is there are common way to give them port numbers? As an example if port number is less than 1024, can i say that this is 100% server port number.

this information is important for me specify the endpoints only with port numbers in our network.

I'm analyzing our network and have some confusion about the terms: this is the 2-packet output from source to destination.

from these i have to get some features as describe, pls make me clear...

1. packets with at least a bytes of TCP data payload: it seems tcp.len>0;

2. The minimum segment size (confusion is headers are included or or not)

3. The average segment size observed during the lifetime of the connection, the definition: is calculated as the value reported in the actual data bytes divided by the actual data pkts reported.

4. Total bytes in IP packets, should be ip_len value.

5. Total bytes in (Ethernet)

6. The total number of bytes sent

probably related to frame.len and frame.cap_len these two terms are describes as, also make me clear about these two terms.

• frame.cap_len: Frame length stored into the capture file
• frame.len: Frame length on the wire

One of my friend has started a company, it's a small-scale company that has a 40 workers.There is two guys also responsible for the security and IT related issues.He is managing the LAN, Webpage of the company, e-mail configuration, printer hardware modification, application deployment etc.

In this point, to provide the security measures including access controls, authentication, web server security etc. Which tools do you use for securing, monitoring and controlling the system ? Are you paying for these tools or are they open source?

This question is due to the security administrators requests to my friend.He offers to get some tools for the company and my friend hesitates to pay that much on them (what he mentioned me.)

ACID properties are important for the RDMS applications.There are many relational database services offered by the cloud providers such as AMAZON RDS and Microsoft SQL Azure.

i'm curious about if the ACID properties are provided or not ?

thanks.

i'm reading cloud vendors solutions for the distributed storage systems such as Amazon Dynamo and Google Big Table.

and really confused in two terms :

1. what is Distrubuted file systems, Do cloud vendors use different kinds of DFS ?
2. what is Distributed storage systems for?
3. what are differences of these terms and functionalities ?

if i understand these terms i will create the general architecture of the cloud vendors, any good tutorial or web page will be appreciated.

Thanks

i don't have enough knowledge about storage systems but have to tell my audiences about how storage works in organization data centers.

For this purpose to keep things simple, first i want to show them a layer from top to bottom and then i want to explore all these layers.

What i mean by layered model in storage architecture?

i want to start my presentation something like that, first layer can be applications, application request a data from storage and then ... ... (the topics i want to cover are file sytems, metadata,the physical implementation of storage (das, nas etc.) ... the request comes to the storage device and storage device (depends on the technology) goes through the disk and disk send back the data using iscsi protol, we can say that the iscsi protocol managing the path between... ...

if you help me explain these steps layer by layer by examples and names of some key technologies to be defined, really appreciate it.

thanks.

in these days i'm reading about intrusion prevention/detection systems.When reading i really confused in some points.

First, the firewall and antivirus technologies are known terms for years, however now IDS becomes popular.

My question includes:

• in organizational network architectures when/where do we use these systems ?
• What are the benefits of using each ?
• Does Firewall contains all these others?

If you give me some examples, it will help much.

Thanks.

Let's assume that i want to use cloud storage service from one of the cloud storage provider, i got X gb structured and unstructured data and i will use this data as my contents of my interactive web page.

And now i have some doubts about this point.I have many users and they are all visiting my web page from various countries.To be more specific first;

does my data stored only of the Cloud Storage data center ? or Does my data replicated over many data centers of my provider?

second if so; how can i benefit from content delivery network? (matching and placing users’ content nearest storage data centers)

Some confusion because of my question so to make it simple :

"What kind of storage do big cloud providers use and why?"

As far as i understand, however I am not able to find any kind of official Storage networking differences between typical data centers and clouds, all cloud providers are using DAS different from the typical data centers.

Even DAS has many disadvantages than SAN or NAS, i want to learn the details why clouds using DAS either for storage or application purposes.

Any resource or description will be appreciated to make me clear.

EDIT: While reading the paper "Networking Challenges and Resultant Approaches for Large Scale Cloud Construction,David Bernstein and Erik Ludvigson (Cisco)" they mention that,

Curiously we do not see Clouds from the major providers using NAS or SAN. The typical Cloud architecture uses DAS, which is not typical of Datacenter storages approaches.

But here there is a conflict: in my opinion and also stated later in the paper, Clouds should use SAN or NAS because of DAS is not appropriate when a VM moves to another server yet still needs to access storage from original server.

What are other reasons effects clouds to prefer DAS, NAS or SAN? what kind of storage do big cloud providers use and why?