performance question

[Steve Mutanson]

I am developing a servlet application. It is connected to the backend database and has lot of business logic needs to be handled as well.
Now, I found that, everytime when I come back on Monday morning and access the site, it takes significantly longer time ( times as long as normal) to get the page, then after that , any following up access to the other sites in the application takes much less time.
Does it have something to do with the fact that I don't access it over the weekend and some stuff is cleaned out, and then later on the system uses cached objects automatically ?

[Bear Bibeault]

Is there any chance that the server has been restarted over the weekend? If so, everything has to load up again upon first hit.
If this is the case, and Monday-morning performace is important to you, you can schedule a job to fire off in the early hours Monday morning that hits the page(s) so that everything is awake and ready when people start hitting it.
hth,
bear

[Steve Mutanson]

Just want to add some more information for my scenario --- Our unix server is periodically shut down and rebooted. And it is scheduled every Sunday midnight. Does this contribute to what happened to me ?

[Steve Mutanson]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
Is there any chance that the server has been restarted over the weekend? If so, everything has to load up again upon first hit.
If this is the case, and Monday-morning performace is important to you, you can schedule a job to fire off in the early hours Monday morning that hits the page(s) so that everything is awake and ready when people start hitting it.
hth,
bear

Thanks bear. I sent out the follow-up post without knowing you have responded. I guess that does affect my MOnday morning page hitting performance. Technically could you suggest how I can automatically make some page hit after the rebooting ?
thanks,

[Steve Mutanson]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
Is there any chance that the server has been restarted over the weekend? If so, everything has to load up again upon first hit.
If this is the case, and Monday-morning performace is important to you, you can schedule a job to fire off in the early hours Monday morning that hits the page(s) so that everything is awake and ready when people start hitting it.
hth,
bear

Actually, I am still bit confused by my observation. We use Solaris Unix server, and use JRun for web component application. During the weekdays while the unix server is always on, occationally we shut down and reboot the JRun. But I find that this NEVER causes any performance problem as what I saw on Monday mornings. So, when unix server is on and I reboot JRun, why don't I see performance problem ?

[Mike Curwen]

It might depend on how much you use sessions in your app. JRun may persist the sessions between shutdown and restart, but might not manage to carry that through a OS restart.

Also, if it pools and maintains database connections, then again JRun may have some sneaky caching, and for sure, over a weekend, whether your box is getting booted or not, a db connection would time out and need to be re-established. This is db connection-pool related and/or driver related.

Also, JRun during it's life might grow to take 'owernship' of a certain number of TCP/IP connections. Where I once worked we had a leaking application that was made worse by the extremely heavy load it experienced. Long story short..Solaris would eventually "run out" of sockets and need to start queueing requests at the OS level. Now on a normally functioning app, perhaps it grows to a certain 'comfort zone' and on Monday morning you have to re-grow it.

That's a couple thoughts.