Websphere Application Server - What on earth will it take to start any fast?

The best way to debug server code is to use remote debugging.

The best way to debug server code is to use remote debugging. First you need to add the following to the JVM params in the server start script: -Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava. Compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005 This will cause the JVM to listen on the specified port, then from your IDE you can start a remote debug session against that port and debug as if the code was running in the same process.

Working this way prevent you restarting the server so frequently and hence side-steps your problem with Websphere's start-up time. You can get some odd results if the binaries on the server and the source in the IDE get out of sync but on the whole that's not a problem.

– Jay Jul 28 '09 at 1:31 simply redeploy when you make changes to your source. This may sound obvious but if you're doing TDD you occasionally forget (well I do) to deploy and find yourself tracing through comments or white-space in the IDE. – Nick Holt Jul 28 '09 at 8:31.

5 to 6 mins is not normal. I use RAD and WAS everyday and get decent startup times. Which version of WAS are you running and how much RAM do you have?

If you share several workspaces and projects for a same WAS profile, consider creating a new WAS profile for your workspace. You probably tried that but here's a simple check list of things to try on first hand: Make sure that your server settings in RAD has "Optimize server for testing and developing" checked, and "Run server with resources on the workspace" selected and "Minimize application files copied to the server" checked. Uncheck "Enable universal test client" if you don't need it.In the admin console you can verify some server settings such as "Run in development mode", "Parallel start" and "Start components as needed".

You can also unistall the ivt app that comes installed by default when creating a new WAS profile. Then the usual things such as a drive that is not too fragemented and a pagefile size that is properly set. And one last thing that you probably know already, Republish to your server instead of Restarting it.

That's one reason why Spring was born. You don't even have to give all the niceties like JMS, remoting, etc. You'd be better off with Tomcat, ActiveMQ, and OpenEJB. Anything but WebSphere.

There's some hints and tips for tuning RAD 6 on developerworks that may help, many of these also apply for RAD 7. I have seen a similar list for RAD 7, I'll post it if I can find it. I did find some tuning tips for Portal on RAD 7.

I would say my experience with the test environment has been suboptimal. I now tend to use Tomcat/Pluto configured for remote debugging with an External launch configuration to manage it from within bare Eclipse and rely on having appropriate JNDI configurations to abstract the underlying server. If you are coding to the relevant APIs it shouldn't matter for development purposes that you're not on Websphere.

If you do have a Webpshere specific issue you can always crank up the beast to debug it.

1 this looks promising – Jack Leow Jul 24 '09 at 16:46.

If you have no EJBs, no JMS, etc. , just deploy under a standalone servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty, you'll be amazed how fast it is :-), being ironic here but it's true!

If the connection pool really is the only appserver feature you use then why don't you simply use apache commons dbcp (commons.apache.org/dbcp/) drop webfear alltogether and use jetty instead. That should reduce your startup time to about 5 seconds. You can then later easily switch to websphere again for your production environment if you should really feel the need to.

There are few services that I would want to use - JAAS for instance. I am not sure if I would be able to do that on jetty. And, its just a safe bet - you are saving yourself migration related issues.

– Jay Jul 24 '09 at 15:31.

WAS V7 addresses some of these problems by allowing you to configure what starts up when the app server starts up. So if and when you migrate to WAS V7 you might seem some improvements in this space.

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