If your site has not maxed out either CPU utilization, database server utilization, or I/O subsystem, the problem may result from synchronized access to one of your system’s resources (such as disk, network, database, etc.). This situation occurs when you access this resource from within a synchronized method in Java. All other requests wait for this monitor lock while you do the I/O, thus wasting both CPU and I/O resources. The only ways around this problem are to recode the Java (the right solution) or add more ATG instances (the wrong solution).
The easiest way to find these problems is to test your site when it is serving pages under load and get a JVM thread dump. By examining the thread dump, you may see one thread waiting for a response from the OS (database or I/O) and a set of other threads waiting on a monitor lock that this other thread has.
Lower Thread Priorities
If you have a rarely used feature that uses a lot of CPU resources, you can lower the priority of the thread that handles requests for that feature. Use the setPriority() method of java.lang.Thread to temporarily lower the thread priority. This will result in higher latency for users of that expensive feature, but prevents that feature from hurting performance of other users.
