Each year, the High Performance On Demand Solutions (HiPODS) team develops innovative solutions to deeply challenging on
demand business issues, with an emphasis on optimizing IT resources and helping IBM customers move toward becoming on demand
businesses. The HiPODS team is committed to sharing its work through a variety of white papers describing best practices,
lessons learned, and technology case studies. This page presents the archived HiPODS papers categorized as follows:
Design for scalability: An update (September 2001)
This updated paper describes component selection and management techniques you can use to make your Web site ready to adapt to increasing traffic. These techniques are the product of IBM's experience working with customers seeking to improve the performance and availability of some of the world's largest Web sites.
Manage Web site performance (May 2001; updated December 2002)
To fine tune Web site performance, you must consider all infrastructure components, from the browser to the database servers and legacy systems. This paper introduces a methodology for managing end-to-end infrastructure performance and identifies best practices and tools that help implement the methodology. This version updates the IBM Tivoli tool information, as well as the list of references
Design pages for performance (May 2000)
Need help figuring out how to reduce the time it takes to download your Web pages? Find out how to cut download times and improve resource utilization by following the design advice here, gleaned from optimizing efforts at high-volume sites.
Case studies
Improving the scalability of a WebSphere application (with multihome servlets) (June 2002)
The HiPODS team assessed the performance and scalability of an online trading application in a large commercial bank and found a major bottleneck in application memory. They developed the multihome servlet technique as an alternative to servlet cloning and significantly improved performance. Get the whole story here. (PDF)
Fine-tuning the scalability of a multi-tier architecture (April 2002)
The HiPODS team is working with Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. to implement a multi-tier architecture built on the WebSphere software platform. This case study explains the later phases of this project: separating business logic and presentation layers into different tiers and testing various scenarios to find which topology provides the best performance. (PDF)
WebSphere
Resilience of WebSphere Portal Clusters Under Load (November 2003)
The IBM High Performance On Demand Solutions team validated the resilience of WebSphere Portal clusters under realistic load conditions against a variety of failure scenarios. They also studied the behavior of the clusters during recovery of application server clones and nodes, verifying the successful redistribution of workload to the recovered clones and/or nodes. This paper reviews the test project and lessons learned, along with a number of best practices settings and guidelines. (PDF file)
Impact of Object Serialization and Local Enterprise JavaBeans™ on Application Server Performance (August 2003)
The objective of this paper is to help software architects and designers make informed choices when implementing remote objects. The paper explains the Java serialization process, related research, and the cost of serialization and deserialization of Java objects within WebSphere Application Server, Version 5.0 environments.
Miscellaneous
Sametime Links Scalability Report (July 2003)
This paper describes a test to understand how Sametime Links could be scaled to support a very large number of users. Overall, the tests showed that Sametime could support 300,000 concurrent Sametime Links clients in the test environment.
Plan for growth (November 2000)
Learn whether your Web site can satisfy future demands and evaluate potential workload and infrastructure changes. This paper also introduces the concept of configuring a Web site based on an analysis of how different components combine to best meet the performance objectives of your particular workload pattern, potentially reducing the costs of prototyping and stress testing. Includes specific example data and graphs, plus sample scenarios scripts you can reuse to break down users' behavior at online shopping, banking, and trading sites.
Case studies
Charles Schwab puts growth plan to the test (May 2001)
This paper describes a joint project between IBM and Charles Schwab and Co., Inc. to develop an architecture for Schwab's Web site that could cope with soaring growth. The paper includes a description of the configuration, the test itself, and the test results.
Advanced Clustering Techniques for Maximizing Web Site Availability with WebSphere Application Server, Version 5 (August 2003)
Server clustering is critical to the on-demand operating environment and, in particular, to the Web infrastructure. Server clustering can be used to help achieve continuous availability of Web sites in the always-on global marketplace. This paper discusses advanced techniques for Web and application server clustering using IBM WebSphere Application Server, Version 5. The information comes from our experiences with High-Volume Web Sites (HVWS) customer projects of the last few years.
Maximize Web site availability (February 2002)
Today's high volume e-business Web sites require the highest possible availability to achieve their business goals for customer satisfaction and profitability. Outages are expensive but high availability is not free. This paper analyzes the tradeoffs and offers the best ways to design your applications and infrastructure to enhance availability and ensure your IT processes promote it. (PDF file)
Building a Custom Web Management Solution with IBM Content Manager for Multiplatforms, Version 8 (November 2003)
Leveraging the capabilities of IBM Content Manager avoids issues common to the development of applications that manage Web content. This paper describes a joint project between IBM and a customer to use IBM Content Manager to develop in a short time a customized application to manage Web content.
Using IBM Content Manager to Manage Web Content (April 2003)
This paper provides an explanation of how the High Performance On Demand Solutions team used IBM Content Manager for Multiplatforms V8.1 to develop and deliver a customized Web content management solution in record time.
