Prashanth's Weblog

Improving the startup performance was always on our mind and that has been one of our focus areas for this release. And yes we have been working on this for a long time now, since the beginning of Glassfish V2 ([1],[2]) and I have been involved in Co-ordinating the effort to improve the startup performance of the Glassfish V2 ([1],[2])'s Domain Administration Server (DAS), Cluster and Instance. Following are the improved results compared to the SJSAS 8.1 version which were captured by our performance lead, Suveen. The numbers below are measured for the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 the Productized version (from Sun) of Glassfish V2 ([1],[2]).

Component	Improved by (%) compared to 8.1
Start/Stop Cluster	20%
Start/Stop Instance	18%
Start/Stop Domain	15%

Very involved task but it was made easy by excellent contributions from the below mentioned Engineers. I thank all of them without which it would not have been possible to reach these better figures. There were other contributions made (Analyzing the profiles data, identifying the problem areas etc.,) by other members which couldn't be shown in numbers, they are Kedar, Suveen , Abhijit and Nazrul.

Following is the detailed list of improvements done in different modules. 

S.No	Description	Improvement	Engineer
0.	Getting the results and constantly monitoring the optimizations and any regressions from build to build on various type of Systems	NA	Suveen
1.	Starting all the system apps concurrently	7%	Tim
2.	Starting all web-modules[user/system] concurrently.	4%	Jan
3.	Parsing overhead of deployment descriptors.	2%	Tim
4.	Removing the load-on-startup from wstx-services application.	6%	Vijay/Jan
5.	Delaying the admingui loading till the first request	7%	Ryan/Jan/ Ken
6.	Delaying loading of the WSTCPServiceLifeCycle module till the first request.	0.5%	Alexy
7.	Threading the LifecycleModuleService initialization	2%	Lloyd
8.	Threading all same-load-order lifecycle modules[WSTCPConnectorLCModule, JBIFrameworkLC] for each of {onInitialization, onStartup, onReady}.
9.	Remove call to registorValidator() for instances.	1.1%	Prashanth
10.	DottedNameOptimization [Bug No : 6491081]	2%	Lloyd
11.	TypeInfo optimization.
12.	AdminChannelServer., load in a separate thread.
13.	ias MBeans removed
14.	Removed the extra JVM invocations from startup/shutdown of servers. Details	Stop - 44% StartDomain - 12%	Byron
15.	ConfigContextImpl.refresh() is called too often	4%	Siva
16.	getAdminMBeanRegistry(), this call shouldn't be there in instance/cluster startup.	4%	Prashanth
17.	Removing the JXTA pipe creation during the application server cluster startup. Move the pipe creation logic to first deployment when the app is deployed with availability enabled set to TRUE	8-10%	Larry White
18.	Move the cascading logic to start domain.	2-4%	Sreeni
19.	JMXConnector for JConsole to be initialized on demand. Details	0.4%	Nandini
20.	Threading all the Lifecycle Modules. This has been shelved as it was proven a risky change and required a lot of testing.	NA	Lloyd, Nandini, Prashanth
21.	Improved JBI Lifecycle Startup time,  optimization in XA recovery, optimizations in Developer profile which in turn improved cluster and EE profiles.	NA	Keith/Derek
22.	Omitting the second and subsequent calls to upgradeCheck in asadmin start-domain	NA	Kedar