Performance advisor types and purposes

Two performance advisors are available: the Performance and Diagnostic Advisor and the performance advisor in Tivoli® Performance Viewer.

The Performance and Diagnostic Advisor runs in the Java™ virtual machine (JVM) process of application server; therefore, it does not provide expensive advice. In a stand-alone application server environment, the performance advisor in Tivoli Performance Viewer runs within the application server JVM.

The performance advisor in Tivoli Performance Viewer provides advice to help tune systems for optimal performance and provide recommendations on inefficient settings by using collected Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) data. Obtain the advice by selecting the performance advisor in Tivoli Performance Viewer.

In a WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment environment, the performance advisor in Tivoli Performance Viewer runs within the JVM of the node agent and can provide advice on resources that are more expensive to monitor and analyze. The Tivoli Performance Viewer advisor requires that you enable performance modules, counters, or both.

Table 1. Performance and Diagnostic Advisor and Tivoli Performance Viewer advisor . The following chart shows the differences between the Performance and Diagnostic Advisor and the Tivoli Performance Viewer advisor:
  Performance and Diagnostic Advisor Tivoli Performance Viewer advisor
Start location Application server Tivoli Performance Viewer client
Invocation of tool Administrative console Tivoli Performance Viewer
Output
  • The SystemOut.log file
  • The administrative console
  • JMX notifications
 Tivoli Performance Viewer in the administrative console
Frequency of operation Configurable When you select refresh in the Tivoli Performance Viewer administrative console
Types of advice

Performance advice:

  • Object Request Broker (ORB) service thread pools
  • Web container thread pools
  • Connection pool size
  • Persisted session size and time
  • Prepared statement cache size
  • Session cache size
  • Memory leak detection
Diagnostic advice:
  • Connection factory diagnostics
  • Data source diagnostics
Connection usage diagnostics
  • Detection of connection use by multiple threads
  • Detection of connection use across components

Performance advice:

  • ORB service thread pools
  • Web container thread pools
  • Connection pool size
  • Persisted session size and time
  • Prepared statement cache size
  • Session cache size
  • Dynamic cache size
  • Java virtual machine (JVM) heap size
  • DB2® Performance Configuration wizard
Note: This topic references one or more of the application server log files. As a recommended alternative, you can configure the server to use the High Performance Extensible Logging (HPEL) log and trace infrastructure instead of using SystemOut.log , SystemErr.log, trace.log, and activity.log files on distributed and IBM® i systems. You can also use HPEL in conjunction with your native z/OS® logging facilities. If you are using HPEL, you can access all of your log and trace information using the LogViewer command-line tool from your server profile bin directory. See the information about using HPEL to troubleshoot applications for more information on using HPEL.