WebSphere Commerce implements serialization mechanisms to prevent certain concurrent updates that could lead to data consistency issues. Although most of the time this serialization is transparent, if while using Javacores or Health Center you see often multiple threads locked, it could be possible to tune the configuration to exclude commands that ... [ + Read more ]

Many sites have a need to integrate with one or more third party external systems, whether this need is for transferring orders, fetching tax information, pricing, payments, etc.  These integrations may operate over a variety of transport methods such as MQ/JMS, HTTP WebServices or RESTful services.  Whenever developing an external ... [ + Read more ]

I recently worked on a PMR where an unusual stack seemed to be causing a lot of WebContainer threads to lock which impacted performance, so I thought of sharing this scenario in case you have been noticing the same during performance tuning, and weren't able to figure out the cause. If ... [ + Read more ]

Javacores have always been crucial for performance tuning and testing. The thread stack section helps you understand what the threads are doing with a level of detail not typically available within monitoring tools.But reading Javacores can be time consuming. You not only need to compare threads from the same Javacore, ... [ + Read more ]

No, the title is not a marketing scam! The Commerce team recently released a set of tools that can be used to validate configuration and performance. By running reports on data collected during an outage, you can gain insight into the state of each layer, which will often help you ... [ + Read more ]

IntroductionTo identify a performance problem is a challenge when requests on WC store front become slow. There are several possible places that can be the source of the problem. It may happen on the web server, WebSphere application server or on the database. In this article, we will have a ... [ + Read more ]

Using RESTful API calls during page rendering is becoming the norm in store front development. It enables developers to isolate the front end from the multitude of backend systems that might provide information. As a result of that separation, performance might degrade due to the overhead introduced by the network. This is ... [ + Read more ]

Caching data is one of the best tool used in WebSphere Commerce to provide great performance. By leveraging a request result that was already computed, the system is able to save a lot of time and CPU. However, caching strategies can be difficult to implement as they require a method ... [ + Read more ]

In my previous article, I showed how you could use the lightweight performance measurement tool (PMT) to find slow requests. Now, that you found them, you probably want to know what could be done to improve things.In this article, I will describe how to use the execution stack reports to ... [ + Read more ]

When a request on a site is slow, finding the source of the problem can be challenging. On one hand, we can monitor the speed of the overall request. This tells us which request is slow, but not much else. On the other hand, enabling trace logs or using java ... [ + Read more ]

While troubleshooting an outage, you can often hear comments such as "The site went down because IHS hit MaxClients," or "The problem was that the number of database connections increased." In a complex multi-tier environment such as Commerce, where a bottleneck in one layer can impact all the other layers, ... [ + Read more ]

Most sites implement this type of cache invalidation: Database triggers are defined for most tables (OOTB triggers are provided), and when data is updated, triggers fire and insert a particular invalidation ID in the CACHEIVL table. Then the DynaCacheInvalidation command scans the table and fires invalidations into the replication domain ... [ + Read more ]

Last year I blogged about ServiceLogger and how useful it can be when troubleshooting performance and bottlenecks. Now I wanted to share the latest enhancements included with V7 Fix Pack 8 Previous post: A handy little tool: Using ServiceLogger for performance and troubleshootingFix Pack 8 additions:SEO TranslationWith fine level, we ... [ + Read more ]

  ServiceLogger is a new lightweight trace that can be used in production. It's available since 7.0.0.4, but 7.0.0.6 includes a couple of important fixes for it. Enabling the logger: The ServiceLogger can be enabled in the WAS Admin Console, the same as any other trace. It works on Config (startup) or Runtime ... [ + Read more ]