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JBoss application server production settings and

performance tuning
Introduction

JBoss AS is a Java application server widely used for

Web application development, testing and production deployment. The community edition
of JBoss is free and open source and is ideal for development and testing. The commercial
edition known as JBoss enterprise application platform is the ideal choice for production
hosting. However in many intranet projects community edition is also used for production
hosting. In this article I will cover JBoss production settings and performance tuning
techniques.
JBoss can be used for large scale deployments and supports load balancing, clustering,
EJBs and a large set of J2EE specifications. The current production version of JBoss is 5.1
and JBoss application server 6.0 may be released in November 2010. Please note that the
following guide uses community edition of JBoss 5.1. I also assume that you are hosting
JBoss in a Windows 2008 or Windows 2003 server. However the steps given are similar for
Unix/Linux systems such as Fedora, Ubuntu and RHEL.

Prerequisites for Running JBoss Server

Before we take up any of the following steps, it is necessary to fix the JBoss version to be
used, the JVM version, the platform for hosting JBoss and whether clustering is required.

These decisions are dependent on application requirements and current enterprise

architecture of the customer. For the examples below I use Java 1.6, JBoss AS 5.1 and
Windows 2003 server.

Download & install Java JBoss application

server requires either Java 1.5 or Java 1.6
installed on the host machine. You can
download Java from here. I recommend
installing Java 1.6.
Download & install JBoss application server
JBoss 5.1 can be downloaded in binary
form from here. This contains a platform
independent release of JBoss server. To
install, just extract the zip file to a folder of
your choice. The image on the right shows
the folder structure of JBoss server
installation.

JBoss Application Server

Fundamentals
JBoss Server 5 uses a new architecture known as the
Microcontainer which is a lightweight container for
managing POJOs and their lifecycle. It also brings
complete support for Java EE5.
JBoss 5 comes with 5 different server
configurations by default. These are all, default, minimal, standard and web. These
configurations are present as different folders under the server folder (see image). These
configurations have different capabilities. When you go to production, you will have to
pick one of these and then customize it for production settings. The easiest would be to pick
"default" configuration and then remove any services not required by your application.
Another way would be to pick "minimal" configuration and then add required services for
your application. Removing unwanted services is easier and hence I will use the "default"
configuration below.
If you are using any server configuration other than "default" you will have to specify it in
the command line of the server startup script. For example use the following command to
run "minimal" configuration.
W:\tools\jboss-5.1.0.GA>run -c minimal
JBoss works "out of the box" and applications can be deployed just by dropping application
WAR/EAR files to the application servers deploy folder. If you are using "default"
configuration, this folder is server/default/deploy.

Configuring JBoss in a Production Server Step by Step

Guide
Step 1 Configuring Startup Scripts
The first thing I did was to create a set of customized startup/shutdown scripts for JBoss
Server. These were copied to the desktop so that it is easy to start or stop the JBoss
instance. Also note that I bind the server to all available network interfaces by using the
bind option (-b). The configuration option (-c) can be used to select a server configuration
and it is optional for "default" configuration.
startjboss.cmd
w:
cd w:\tools\jboss-5.1.0.GA\bin
run.bat -b 0.0.0.0 -c default
stopjboss.cmd
w:
cd w:\tools\jboss-5.1.0.GA\bin
shutdown.bat -S
As you can see both these scripts are actually calling default scripts provided in the JBoss
bin folder.
In the startup script the -b argument (binding ip) indicates the IP to which the server session
is to be attached. 0.0.0.0 indicates that the server must be accessible from all ips including
localhost (it binds the JBoss server to all ip addresses of server machine). If you dont
specify this, JBoss will be accessible only from 127.0.0.1.
Step 2 Configuring JVM Memory Settings
The run.conf.bat file in the bin folder contains JVM parameters including memory
configuration. In the production server, ensure that these values are correctly set. For
example, the following sets the minimum and maximum heap size as 1GB. It is better to
keep them identical for performance reasons. The actual heap size setting will depend on
your application requirements and also on the RAM size of the server machine.
set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m"
Also ensure that adequate permgen space is set. Permgen space is the fixed memory
required such as the code footprint. For large applications the default value of 256m may
not be sufficient. Following sets the permgen space to 512MB.

set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

If you want to fine tune JVM settings, you can try changing parameters such as NewSize,
MaxNewSize and Survivor Ratio. See this page for more details.
Step 3 Changing Default HTTP Port to 80
The HTTP port for default JBoss installation is 8080. In production server, you will require
this to be on port 80 (default HTTP port). If you are using HTTPS, you will need to change
SSL port from 8443 to 443. In JBoss 5, changing default ports are easy. You just need to
modify only one file.
(a) default/conf/bindingservice.beans/META-INF/bindings-jboss-beans.xml
Open this file and then modify Web server properties located towards the end of the file.
You can also search for 8080 and 8443.
Step 4 Configuring Datasource Settings
The datasource settings are stored in xml files under deploy folder of the server. For
example, oracle-ds.xml is the configuration file I used in my application. This maps a
connection setting to a JNDI name. The important parameters to configure are,
min-pool-size This is the initial number of connections kept open to database.
max-pool-size This is the maximum number of concurrent connections possible to the
database. This value should be based on your application needs and also on the database
configuration.
Step 5 Configuring HTTP Connector Settings
The underlying HTTP connector of JBoss needs to be fine tuned for production settings.
The following settings are applied to the Connector tag in the
default/deploy/jbossweb.sar/server.xml file. The important parameters are,
maxThreads This indicates the maximum number of threads to be allocated for handling
client HTTP requests. This figure corresponds to the concurrent users that are going to
access the application. Depending on the machine configuration, there is a physical limit
beyond which you will have to do clustering.
acceptCount This is the number of request threads that are put in request queue when all
available threads are used. When this exceeds, client machines get a request timeout
response.
compression If you set this attribute to "force", the content will be compressed by JBoss
and will be send to browser. Browser will extract it and display the page on screen.
Enabling compression can substantially reduce bandwidth requirements of your application.

Step 6 Configuring JSP Compilation Settings for Production

JBoss application server regularly checks whether a JSP requires compilation to a servlet
before executing a JSP. In a production server, JSP files wont change and hence you can
configure the settings for increased performance.
Open the web.xml in default/deployers/jboss-web.deployer folder. Look for the jsp
servlet (org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet) in the file and modify the following XML
fragment as given below,
<init-param>
<param-name>development</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>checkInterval</param-name>
<param-value>300</param-value>
</init-param>
Step 7 Removing unwanted applications and services
JBoss comes with a lot of services and your enterprise applications may not need all of
them. Removing these unwanted services can boost application server performance.
Following are some of the JBoss services you can remove if your application is not using
them in production. Delete the files/folders given in brackets to remove these services
completely.
(a) Home page server- (deploy/ROOT.war)
(b) JMX Console server (deploy/jmx-console.war)
(c) Web Console server (deploy/management)
(d) Unique ID key generator - (deploy/uuid-key-generator.sar, lib/autonumber-plugin.jar)
(e) HTTP Invoker service (deploy/http-invoker.sar)
(f) Quartz scheduler service (deploy/quartz-ra.rar)
(g) Mail service (deploy/mail-service.xml, lib/mail*.jar)
(h) Monitoring service (deploy/monitoring-service.xml,lib/jboss-monitoring.jar)
(i) Scheduler service (deploy/scheduler-service.xml, deploy/schedule-managerservice.xml,lib/scheduler-plugin*.jar)
(j) Messaging (JMS) service (deploy/messaging, deploy/jms-ds.xml, deploy/jms-ra.rar,
lib/jboss-messaging*.jar)
Step 8 Protecting Administration Console Applications
Some of the default Web applications in JBoss are very useful in monitoring server status.
For example the Web Console can give valuable information such as server memory status
and active HTTP active connections. Please see the Web Console screenshot below
(http://localhost/web-console/),

So you may decide to leave them enabled on the JBoss production server. But the problem
is that these can be accessed by anyone through Internet and is unprotected. When you run
JBoss with production settings you obviously want to protect these applications.
You can protect these applications using JAAS or by limiting access to these applications
only from the local machine (server machine). Of course the easiest way to secure them is
to remove them as I have shown in the previous section. In order to enable access only from
local machine,
Add the following in server.xml (default/deploy/jbossweb.sar) just before "Engine" closing
tag.
<Host name="loopback" autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false"
deployXML="false">
</Host>
Then add the following in jboss-web.xml in WEB-INF of the following admin applications.
<virtual-host>loopback</virtual-host>

For JMX Console use deploy/jmx-console.war and for Web Console use
deploy/management folder. Now these monitoring apps can be accessed only from
http://loopback address.
Step 9 Configuring Log4J Logging for Production
The default logging configuration in JBoss is not suitable for production deployment. In
production, you only want the errors to be logged. Open jboss-log4j.xml file in default/conf
folder.
First change the root category located at the end of the file jboss-log4j.xml to contain only
FILE appender. This ensures that there is logging to the screen (CONSOLE) and all errors
are only logged to a file.
<root>
<appender-ref ref="FILE"/>
</root>
Then add the following limiting categories.
<category name="org">
<priority value="ERROR"/>
</category>
<category name="com">
<priority value="ERROR"/>
</category>
<category name="net">
<priority value="ERROR"/>
</category>
Remove the following entries. Please note that the following list is not exhaustive. You can
remove all categories and then add the three categories given above. This ensures that only
errors are logged. Also the changes to the logging configuration is hot deployed within a
minute and hence you dont need to restart the server.
<category name="org.apache">
<priority value="INFO"/>
</category>
<category name="org.quartz">
<priority value="INFO"/>
</category>
<category name="org.jboss.management">
<priority value="INFO"/>
</category>
<category name="org.jboss.serial">
<priority value="INFO"/>
</category>

Another simpler way to control logging is to change the priority attribute of the root logger.
Set it to ERROR as shown below.
<root>
<priority value="ERROR"/>
<appender-ref ref="FILE"/>
</root>
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October 28, 2010 | Posted in Programming 2 Comments

2 Comments to JBoss application server production settings and

performance tuning
1. can one process ocupy the whole cpu while other processes are idle? Says:
December 2nd, 2010 at 10:57 pm

[...] options Here are some links to look at: http://java.dzone.com/articles/javaperformance-tuning http://www.jaysonjc.com/programming/ning-tips.html
http://java.sun.com/developer/techni/jconsole.html <= Pay particular attention to
#/threads, [...]
2. Raja Says:
May 19th, 2011 at 5:26 am

Excellent. Very useful for basic level setup and having a nice information.

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