Transaction Service Settings

The transaction manager makes it possible to commit and roll back distributed transactions.

A distributed transactional system writes transactional activity into transaction logs so that they can be recovered later. But writing transactional logs has some performance penalty.

The following topics are addressed here:

• Monitoring the Transaction Service

• Tuning the Transaction Service

Monitoring the Transaction Service

Transaction Manager monitoring is disabled by default. Enable monitoring of the transaction service through the GlassFish Server Administration Console by navigating to the Configurations->configuration-name->Monitoring node. Refer to the Administration Console for complete instructions.

You can also enable monitoring with these commands:

set serverInstance.transaction-service.monitoringEnabled=true
reconfig serverInstance

Viewing Monitoring Information

To view monitoring information for the transaction service in the GlassFish Server Administration Console, navigate to the server (Admin Server) node and then select the Monitor tab.

The following statistics are gathered on the transaction service:

• total-tx-completed Completed transactions.

• total-tx-rolled-back Total rolled back transactions.

• total-tx-inflight Total inflight (active) transactions.

• isFrozen Whether transaction system is frozen (true or false)

• inflight-tx List of inflight (active) transactions.

Tuning the Transaction Service

This property can be used to disable the transaction logging, where the performance is of utmost importance more than the recovery. This property, by default, won’t exist in the server configuration.

Most Transaction Service tuning tasks can be performed through the GlassFish Server Administration Console by navigating to the Configurations->configuration-name->Transaction Service node and then following the instructions in the online help. Alternatively, you can follow the instructions in Chapter 19, Administering Transactions, in Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 Administration Guide.

Disable Distributed Transaction Logging

You can disable transaction logging through the Administration Console or by using the following asadmin set subcommand:

asadmin set 
server1.transaction-service.disable-distributed-transaction-logging=true

Disabling transaction logging can improve performance. Setting it to false (the default), makes the transaction service write transactional activity to transaction logs so that transactions can be recovered. If Recover on Restart is checked, this property is ignored.

Set this property to true only if performance is more important than transaction recovery.

Recover On Restart (Automatic Recovery)

You can set the Recover on Restart attribute through the Administration Console or by entering the following asadmin set subcommand:

asadmin set server1.transaction-service.automatic-recovery=false

When Recover on Restart is true, the server will always perform transaction logging, regardless of the Disable Distributed Transaction Logging attribute.

If Recover on Restart is false, then:

• If Disable Distributed Transaction Logging is false (the default), then the server will write transaction logs.

• If Disable Distributed Transaction Logging is true, then the server will not write transaction logs.

  Not writing transaction logs will give approximately twenty percent improvement in performance, but at the cost of not being able to recover from any interrupted transactions. The performance benefit applies to transaction-intensive tests. Gains in real applications may be less.

Keypoint Interval

The keypoint interval determines how often entries for completed transactions are removed from the log file. Keypointing prevents a process log from growing indefinitely.

Frequent keypointing is detrimental to performance. The default value of the Keypoint Interval is 2048, which is sufficient in most cases.