Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 Performance Tuning Guide

Tuning the EJB Cache

A bean in the cache represents the ready state in the EJB lifecycle. This means that the bean has an identity (for example, a primary key or session ID) associated with it.

Beans moving out of the cache have to be passivated or destroyed according to the EJB lifecycle. Once passivated, a bean has to be activated to come back into the cache. Entity beans are generally stored in databases and use some form of query language semantics to load and store data. Session beans have to be serialized when storing them upon passivation onto the disk or a database; and similarly have to be deserialized upon activation.

Any incoming request using these “ready” beans from the cache avoids the overhead of creation, setting identity, and potentially activation. So, theoretically, it is good to cache as many beans as possible. However, there are drawbacks to caching:

Keeping in mind how your application uses stateful session beans and entity beans, and the amount of traffic your server handles, tune the EJB cache size and time-out settings to minimize the number of activations and passivations.

EJB Cache Settings

An individual EJB component can specify cache settings that override those of the EJB container in the <bean-cache> element of the EJB component’s sun-ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptor.

The EJB cache settings are:

Max Cache Size

Maximum number of beans in the cache. Make this setting greater than one. The default value is 512. A value of zero indicates the cache is unbounded, which means the size of the cache is governed by Cache Idle Timeout and Cache Resize Quantity. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is max-cache-size.

Cache Resize Quantity

Number of beans to be created or deleted when the cache is serviced by the server. Valid values are from zero to MAX_INTEGER, and the default is 16. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is resize-quantity.

Removal Timeout

Amount of time that a stateful session bean remains passivated (idle in the backup store). If a bean was not accessed after this interval of time, then it is removed from the backup store and will not be accessible to the client. The default value is 60 minutes. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is removal-timeout-in-seconds.

Removal Selection Policy

Algorithm used to remove objects from the cache. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is victim-selection-policy.Choices are:

  • NRU (not recently used). This is the default, and is actually pseudo-random selection policy.

  • FIFO (first in, first out)

  • LRU (least recently used)

Cache Idle Timeout

Maximum time that a stateful session bean or entity bean is allowed to be idle in the cache. After this time, the bean is passivated to the backup store. The default value is 600 seconds. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is cache-idle-timeout-in-seconds.

Refresh period

Rate at which a read-only-bean is refreshed from the data source. Zero (0) means that the bean is never refreshed. The default is 600 seconds. The corresponding EJB deployment descriptor attribute is refresh-period-in-seconds. Note: this setting does not have a custom field in the Admin Console. To set it, use the Add Property button in the Additional Properties section.