Tuning the Anonymous Pool

When you configure the Siebel Application Interface profile using Siebel Management Console, as described in Siebel Installation Guide, you can configure the size of the anonymous pool used for inbound Siebel EAI requests. The Anonymous Pool Size field appears when you select both Configure EAI HTTP Inbound Transport and Configure Anonymous Pool during configuration.

The anonymous pool is a set of EAI tasks used for WS-Security SOAP Web services. It provides a set of EAI threads and tasks ready for use and reuse, over and over. Tasks are prestarted and logged in as the anonymous user. As new requests come in, they impersonate and run on the context of the user making the request, based on the SOAP header, then switch back to the anonymous user and stay idle, ready for reuse by a new request.

Without load balancing, there is a 1:1 mapping to EAI servers (Siebel Servers), so the upper limit of EAI threads is theoretically the same as the setting of MaxTasks. However, when you size the anonymous pool, you must also account for requests that use the EAI framework but are not otherwise EAI requests, including REST, JCA, and session management SOAP calls. Therefore, the upper limit of EAI threads is actually MaxTasks minus these other non-anonymous EAI use cases.

With load balancing, one anonymous pool on the Siebel Application Interface might map to more than one EAI server. In this case, the upper limit is the combination of the MaxTasks values for all of the available servers, again discounting non-anonymous EAI use cases. The larger the anonymous pool, the larger the memory requirements on the Siebel Application Interface. And, the larger the anonymous pool, the more EAI tasks are started that wait to be used, and the larger the corresponding impact on memory consumption for the EAI server. With multiple instances of Siebel Application Interface, the effective size of the combined anonymous pool is the sum of the pool size on each instance. See also the other topics in this guide that discuss MaxTasks.

You can further adjust load balancing behavior through configuration of third-party load balancers and Web servers, as well as configuration of Siebel Application Interface profiles.

No single log indicates the current effective anonymous pool size. However, you can derive this information from the Siebel Application Interface statistics page, by looking at the EAI Object Manager correlated with the anonymous user name, which is appended to the session string. For an example of a statistics page, see the chapter about configuring Siebel Application Interface logging and monitoring in Siebel System Monitoring and Diagnostics Guide. For example, in the following string from a statistics page, 900017 is the task ID on the EAI server:

siebel.TCPIP.NONE.NONE://SIEBSRVR_HOST:2321/siebel/EAIObjMgr_enu/!1.2a40.900017.5d1 60ee4anonuser