As with any modern Web-based application, the browser response time for Oracle Portal pages largely depends on the number of user requests and the hardware employed to service them. Displaying a single page to a user may require many separate transactions, from verifying whether the user has permission to view the page, to loading the images that appear on the page, to calling a style sheet that contains formatting information for the page, and so on.
Changing the hardware deployed for a production portal is usually a difficult task, so administrators must rely on performance tuning the portal to maximize the performance from the available hardware. Performance tuning can take on many facets especially in Oracle Portal's multi-tier architecture. Each tier provides tuning options that can degrade performance if not configured correctly.
Oracle Portal provides several caching options so that page designers and administrators can optimize the performance of the pages they design. It is important that these caching options are analyzed, for pages, portlets, and templates, before you deploy your portal. This step will ensure that the optimum caching policy is employed on a page by page and portlet by portlet basis, and make sure that your portal is as performant as possible when it is finally deployed in production.
This chapter provides a short overview of the caching options available to page designers and administrators. It includes the following subsections:
The holistic processes involved for performance tuning are not discussed in this chapter. In-depth performance advice and analysis for Oracle Portal is available from the Performance page on the Oracle Portal section of the Oracle Technology Network, http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/performance_10g1014.html
The content of this chapter is intended for users with at least the Manage privilege on the pages you will work with. If a particular task requires, or can be performed under, different privileges, those privileges will be listed before the steps of that task. For more information on page privileges, see Section B.3, "Page and Tab Privileges".