Chapter 5
Tuning Operating System

Tuning Solaris TCP/IP settings benefits programs that open and close many sockets. The Sun ONE Application Server operates with a small fixed set of connections and the performance gain may not be as significant on the Application Server node. Improvements for the Web Server, configured as a Web front-end to Sun ONE Application Server, can have significant benefits. The following topics are discussed:

Tuning Parameters
Solaris File Descriptor Setting

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Tuning Parameters

The following table shows the operating system tuning, for Solaris, used when benchmarking for performance and scalability. These values are an example of how you may tune your system to achieve the desired result.

Table 5-1  Tuning the Solaris Operating System

Parameter	Scope	Default Value	Tuned Value	Comments
rlim_fd_max	/etc/system	1024	8192	Process open file descriptors limit; should account for the expected load (for the associated sockets, files, pipes if any).
rlim_fd_cur	/etc/system	1024	8192
sq_max_size	/etc/system	2	0	Controls streams driver queue size; setting to 0 makes it infinity so the performance runs wont be hit by lack of buffer space. Set on clients too.
tcp_close_wait_interval	ndd /dev/tcp	240000	60000	Set on clients as well.
tcp_time_wait_interval	ndd /dev/tcp	240000	60000
tcp_conn_req_max_q	ndd /dev/tcp	128	1024
tcp_conn_req_max_q0	ndd /dev/tcp	1024	4096
tcp_ip_abort_interval	ndd /dev/tcp	480000	60000
tcp_keepalive_interval	ndd /dev/tcp	7200000	900000	For high traffic web sites lower this value.
tcp_rexmit_interval_initial	ndd /dev/tcp	3000	3000	If retransmission is greater than 30-40%, you should increase this value.
tcp_rexmit_interval_max	ndd /dev/tcp	240000	10000
tcp_rexmit_interval_min	ndd /dev/tcp	200	3000
tcp_smallest_anon_port	ndd /dev/tcp	32768	1024	Set on clients too.
tcp_slow_start_initial	ndd /dev/tcp	1	2	Slightly faster transmission of small amounts of data.
tcp_xmit_hiwat	ndd /dev/tcp	8129	32768	To increase the transmit buffer.
tcp_recv_hiwat	ndd /dev/tcp	8129	32768	To increase the transmit buffer.
tcp_conn_hash_size	ndd /dev/tcp	512	8192	The connection hash table keeps all the information for active TCP connections (ndd -get /dev/tcp tcp_conn_hash). This value does not limit the number of connections, but it can cause connection hashing to take longer. To make lookups more efficient, set the value to half of the number of concurrent TCP connections that you expect on the server (netstat -nP tcp|wc -l, gives you a number). It defaults to 512. This can only be set in /etc/system and becomes effective at boot time.

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Solaris File Descriptor Setting

On Solaris, setting the maximum number of open files property using ulimit has the biggest impact on your efforts to support the maximum number of RMI/IIOP clients.

To increase the hard limit, add the following command to /etc/system and reboot it once:

set rlim_fd_max = 8192

You can verify this hard limit by using the following command:

ulimit -a -H

Once the above hard limit is set, you can increase the value of this property explicitly (up to this limit) using the following command:

ulimit -n 8192

You can verify this limit by using the following command:

ulimit -a

For example, with the default ulimit of 64, a simple test driver can support only 25 concurrent clients, but with ulimit set to 8192, the same test driver can support 120 concurrent clients. The test driver spawned multiple threads, each of which performed a JNDI lookup and repeatedly called the same business method with a think (delay) time of 500ms between business method calls, exchanging data of about 100KB.

These settings apply to RMI/IIOP clients (on Solaris). Refer to Solaris documentation on the Sun Microsystems documentation web site (www.docs.sun.com) for more information on setting the file descriptor limits.

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