Tuning User Self Care

You can improve User Self Care performance by adjusting settings for several distributed caches.

User Self Care maintains three different distributed caches:

• Account Create Cache
• Forgotten Password Cache
• Secret Question Failure Cache

The caches are shared among WebSphere® Application Server cluster members to permit a user operation to be properly handled. This sharing is required in case different phases of the operation take place on different nodes.

User Self Care uses the WebSphere Distributed Object Cache technology for implementation of the caches. See the WebSphere Application Server documentation for details on this caching technology.

There are two parameter types that affect each User Self Care distributed cache:

Entry lifetimes

These parameters are set in the User Self Care response file. Cache entries are retained until either the lifetime is hit or the user finishes the operation requiring the cache entry. The names and settings of these cache-specific parameters are described in the individual cache tuning descriptions later in this set of topics.

Cache sizes

These parameters are set in the administrative console by accessing Resources > Cache Instances > Object Cache Instances. The Cache size parameter controls how many concurrent entries are retained in the cache. The names and settings of these cache-specific parameters are described in the individual cache tuning descriptions

You must size the caches adequately so users can perform operations that require a distributed cache in the configured time period. If a cache is too small, users might not be able to validate their accounts or recover their passwords during the specified time period. You can specify the time period in the configuration for lifetime of the cache entries.

For example, to give your users two minutes to finish an account recovery validation, configure the entry lifetime for the account recovery validation cache to be two minutes. If you expect two users per second to perform an account recovery operation, set the account recovery validation cache to at least 240.

Determine the appropriate size using the following calculation:

120 seconds x 2 users/second = 240

The default size of the account recovery validation cache is 1000 entries. This default would be adequate for this example. Other operations, such as account creation, might require an increase in the cache size.

Depending on your expected system usage, you might increase the size of one or more caches. This adjustment can affect your hardware requirements. Cache entries take up memory and must be replicated between systems in the cluster.

A preferred performance tuning practice is to provide a buffer for the expected cache size.

See the following topics: