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Did you all get a chance to read that? As a public company we need to have Vista is the only solution built from the ground up on true enterprise

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our disclosure statement before all presentations. If you have any questions

on what it means please speak with our General Counsel.

Vista is the only solution built from the ground up on true enterprise

technology --- allowing you to ensure that you continue to provide your

faculty and students an outstanding experience

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/mc-p/321147947/

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In 32-bit world, made an argument for clustering. With rise of 64-bit, plus

greater stability with –XX options making a pitch away from clustering.

Almost not necessary with virtualization, larger heaps and load-balancing.

Becomes relevant again when we remove Web Server from architecture.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/8268257@N04/498871739/

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/t_squared/152270386/

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yanivg/131377774/

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ale2000/1275120868/

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Complete list of –XX Options: http://sevenseconds.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/the-most-complete-list-of-

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http://sevenseconds.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/the-most-complete-list-of-xx-options-for-java-6-jvm/

In our most recent benchmark we settled on a 4GB JVM and 1000

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threads/interfaces. It was sufficient to support 5000+ active/live sessions

with exception response times (99% under 3s, 95% under 2s and 90% under

1s.). Latency vastly improved with aggressive –XX options. Below is an

example of options we use from our wrapper.conf:

# Initial Java Heap Size (in MB)

wrapper.java.initmemory=4g

# Maximum Java Heap Size (in MB)

wrapper.java.maxmemory=4g

wrapper.java.additional.18=-Xloggc:C:/Bb/blackboard/logs/tomcat/gc.log

wrapper.java.additional.19=-XX:NewSize=1g

wrapper.java.additional.20=-XX:MaxNewSize=1g

wrapper.java.additional.21=-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC

wrapper.java.additional.22=-XX:+UseParNewGC

wrapper.java.additional.23=-XX:ParallelGCThreads=(set this equal to the

number of CPUs available for generational collections)

wrapper.java.additional.24=-XX:+PrintGCDetails

wrapper.java.additional.25=-XX:+PrintGCDateStamps

wrapper.java.additional.26=-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch

wrapper.java.additional.27=-XX:ParallelCMSThreads=(set this equal to the

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80854523@N00/2925662718/

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Easily configured Virtual Machine by cloning VMs using XenCenter

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Toad is our primary database access tool. While we use SQLPlus for many

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operations, Toad provides a robust, easy to use visual interface that we use

for script execution and basic DBA tasks. Many of the basic views that come

with Toad are helpful in quickly spotting issues such as misplaced indexes in

the wrong tablespaces, as well as viewing the size of tablespaces and data

files. We also use it for script execution of routine database maintenance

functions.

PAO (Performance Analysis for Oracle) is our primary monitoring and

instrumentation tool we use in Blackboard performance engineering. There

are many reasons for using the tool set, but our primary reason is the

warehousing capabilities. Our secondary reason for using the tool is the

ability to compare timelines. We can take a baseline of activity, make a

change to our configuration and perform a simple comparison of the

workloads.

Foglight is by far my absolute favorite performance instrumentation tool. We

use the Tomcat cartridge for Foglight primary as it’s a lightweight

instrumentation framework and imposes minimal overhead. I like a number

of aspects, but my favorite three are the following:

1. I love that I can define a simple rule engine to perform a trace of the

application code, including collecting SQL literals. Better yet, I can step into

the trace and do a fast find by exclusive time to see what method call or SQL

statement was responsible for consuming the most time.

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