Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 Performance Tuning Guide

Stateless Session Beans

Stateless session beans are more readily pooled than entity or the stateful session beans. Valid values for steady-pool-size, pool-resize-quantity and max-pool-size are the best tunables for these type of beans. Set the steady-pool-size to greater than zero if you want to pre-populate the pool. This way, when the container comes up, it creates a pool with steady-pool-size number of beans. By pre-populating the pool it is possible to avoid the object creation time during method invocations.

Setting the steady-pool size to a very large value can cause unwanted memory growth and can result in large garbage collection times. pool-resize-quantity determines the rate of growth as well as the rate of decay of the pool. Setting it to a small value is better as the decay behaves like an exponential decay. Setting a small max-pool-size can cause excessive object destruction (and as a result excessive object creation) as instances are destroyed from the pool if the current pool size exceeds max-pool-size.