Enhancing Overall System Performance

The following performance enhancement controls can be applied to BEA Tuxedo release 8.0 or later.

Service and Interface Caching

BEA Tuxedo release 8.0 or later allows you to cache service and interface entries, and to use the cached copies of the service or interface without locking the bulletin board. This feature represents a significant performance improvement, especially in systems with large numbers of clients and only a few services.

The SICACHEENTRIESMAX option has been added to the MACHINCES and SERVERS sections of the configuration file to allow you to define the maximum number of service cache entries that any process and/or server can hold.

Since caching may not be useful for every client or every application, the TMSICACHEENTRIESMAX environment variable has been added to control the cache size. The default value for TMSICACHEENTRIESMAX is preconfigured so that no administrative changes are necessary when upgrading from previous releases. TMSICACHEENTRIESMAX can also control the number of cache entries, since it is not desirable for clients to grow too large.

Service Caching Limitations

The following limitations apply to the caching feature:

Notes: For more information about the SICACHEENTRIESMAX option, refer to the ubbconfig(5)and TM_MIB(5) sections in the File Formats, Data Descriptions, MIBs, and System Processes Reference.

For more information about the TMSICACHEENTRIESMAX variable, refer to the tuxenv(5)section in the File Formats, Data Descriptions, MIBs, and System Processes Reference.

Removing Authorization and Auditing Security

For BEA Tuxedo release 7.1, the AAA (authentication, authorization, and auditing) security features were added so that implementations using the AAA plug-in functions would not need to base security on the BEA Tuxedo administrative option. As a result, the BEA Engine AAA security functions are always called in the main BEA Tuxedo 7.1 code path. Since many applications do not use security, they should not pay the overhead price of these BEA Engine security calls.

For BEA Tuxedo release 8.0 or later, the NO_AA option has been added to the OPTIONS parameter in the RESOURCES section of the configuration file. The NO_AA option will circumvent the calling of the authorization and auditing security functions. Since most applications need authentication, this feature cannot be turned off.

If the NO_AA option is enabled, the following SECURITY parameters may be affected:

Note: For more information about the NO_AA option, refer to the ubbconfig(5)and TM_MIB(5) sections in the File Formats, Data Descriptions, MIBs, and System Processes Reference.

Turning Off Multithreaded Processing

For BEA Tuxedo release 7.1, a generalized threading feature was added. Due to the generality of the architecture, all ATMI calls must call mutexing functions in order to protect sensitive state information. Furthermore, the layering of the engine and caching schemes used in the libraries cause more mutexing. For applications that do not use threads, turning them off can result in significant performance improvements without making changes to the application code.

To turn off multi-threaded processing, the TMNOTHREADS environment variable has been implemented for BEA Tuxedo release 8.0 or later. With this feature, individual processes can turn threads on and off without introducing a new API or flag in order to do so.

If the TMNOTHREADS variable is set to "yes", then the calls to the mutexing functions are avoided.

Note: For more information about TMNOTHREADS, refer to the tuxenv(5) section in File Formats, Data Descriptions, MIBs, and System Processes Reference.

Turning Off XA Transactions

Although not all BEA Tuxedo applications use XA transactions, all processes pay the cost of transactional semantics by calling internal transactional verbs. To boost performance for applications that don't use XA transactions for BEA Tuxedo release 8.0 or later, the NO_XA flag has been has been added to the OPTIONS parameter in the RESOURCES section of the configuration file.

No XA transactions are allowed when the NO_XA flag is set. It is important to remember though, that any attempt to configure TMS services in the GROUPS section will fail if the NO_XA option has been specified.

Note: For more information about the NO_XA option, refer to the ubbconfig(5)and TM_MIB(5) sections in the File Formats, Data Descriptions, MIBs, and System Processes Reference.