Monitoring Database during the performance testing

You should monitor your database server very carefully when your executing the load test on the portal server. You can monitor couple of things a) The database server itself to check CPU, Memory of db server,...

On the portal side you can monitor how the connection to data base and the performance of the queries are doing by following these steps

1. Login into the WebSphere Application Server Admin Console and go to Monitor and Tuning -> Performance Viewer -> Current Activity


2. Enable the monitoring of the data source that you want. The release database is used queried a lot in portal because it has the data related portal layout, access control, ..etc. Enable the monitoring on release data source
   
   


3. After enabling the release data source monitoring click on View Modules button, it will display information about release data source like this.
   
   
   The TPV will display details related to release data source. In these details three fields are very important
   
   
   
   • Time spent executing database calls(JDBCTime): This is the time required for issuing database queries. This value should normally be <35ms.
   
   
   • Connection pool average wait time(WaitTime): This should be very close to 0. Otherwise, it means that the database pool is likely too small, causing many connections to wait
   
   
   • Connection pool Prepared statement cache discards(PrepStmtCacheDiscardCount): Prepared JDBC query statements are stored in JVM memory, reducing CPU load on the debase server. Calculate the ratio for each data source (wpsdb, jrcdb, wmmdb, and so forth): Discard ratio = # of discards / total # of queries If you see a data source with a very high ratio, you should increase the size of the prepared statement cache associated with that data source. Since wpsdb is the most critical to overall portal performance, make sure its discard ratio is low (<10%). If your portal implementation makes heavy usage of WCM or Personalization, pay special attention to the JCR data source. If your users are stored in the database, instead of LDAP, or if you have a lot of user data stored in the LookAside database, pay extra attention to the WMM data source