General Performance Tunings

In general, you can optimize Identity Manager performance if you do the following:

• Turn off tracing (such as Java class, userform, and workflow tracing). Tracing can add substantial overhead.

• Run the Identity Manager built-in Audit Log Maintenance Task and System Log Maintenance Task to configure log record expirations. Log records can grow without bound, so use these tasks to prevent the repository database from running out of space. For information, see the Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Business Administrator’s Guide.

• Check the README file in Identity Manager updates (formerly called service packs or installation packs) to see if any performance improvements have been made to the product. If so, schedule an upgrade.

• Consider the performance impact when fetching data from one or more remote systems, including the Identity Manager repository.

• Increase the number of application server instances running Identity Manager, either on the same server or by adding servers, and use a load-balancing tool to distribute the requests between instances.

• Keep the size of files referenced in a binary attribute as small as possible. Loading extremely large graphics files, for example, can decrease Identity Manager performance.

• Write robust and readable XML code that minimizes duplication (for example, refactored), that uses memory efficiently, and that mitigates the impact to overall system performance.

• Configure Identity Manager system monitoring to track events in real time.

  You can view these events in dashboard graphs to quickly assess system resources, spot abnormalities, understand historical performance trends (based on the time of day, the day of week, and so forth), and interactively isolate problems before looking at audit logs. Dashboards do not provide as much detail as audit logs, but can provide hints about where to look for problems in the logs.

  For more information about dashboards, see Chapter 8, Reporting, in Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Business Administrator’s Guide.