Introduction to Tuning Concepts

The most important concept associated with tuning your OracleAS TopLink application is the idea of an iterative approach. The most effective way to tune your application is to:

• Use a profiling tool, such as the OracleAS TopLink Performance Profiler, to measure the performance of the application.

• Modify application components.

• Measure performance again.

To identify the changes that improve your application performance, modify only one or two components at a time. You should also tune your application in a nonproduction environment before you deploy the application.

OracleAS TopLink as Part of a Larger Application

An OracleAS TopLink application is part of a larger application infrastructure that can include Web servers, external cache managers, external transactions controllers, and so on. To tune the OracleAS TopLink application most effectively, consider how the application interacts with the larger infrastructure, and include those considerations in performance testing.

An Effective Tuning Approach

To optimize performance, first check whether a standard OracleAS TopLink feature addresses the problem you are trying to solve. The OracleAS TopLink documentation discusses the most common optimizations in the context of features they support. For example, "Query Object Performance Options" offers information on how to improve query performance.

After you implement the basic optimizations, consider the more complex optimizations provided in this chapter, which include:

• General Tuning Tips

• Basic Performance Optimization

• OracleAS TopLink Reading Optimization Features

• OracleAS TopLink Writing Optimization Features

• Schema Optimization