Best Practices

I keep jolting down tips and learning with respect to best practise for Weblogic Server so as to minimize errors and issues.

1. Do not deploy applications to the Administration server.

The Administration server comes with the console application, hence the load on the administration server would increase and might impact performance and memory consumption.

The JVM is by default tuned to be best suited to the admin console application which may not be suited for the new application you are planning to deploy on the administrtation server.

The administration server in the backgraound does a lot of activity like checking the managed server state, checking the state of the applications on the managed servers as well as monitoring using JMX server MBeans whch is ofcource a continues overhead.

2. If your application is quite Heavy i.e. say >100 MB then it is recommended to deploy your application in exploded format and not as a war or ear.

Reason bieng, it takes a overhead extracting this EAR or WAR when it gets ready to be processed.

I have experiend a war which was 800 MB and we were trying to set the welcome page for that application but the welcome page never comes up.

The cause of this issue was that the application server was not able to extract my war and read the descriptor file to read the name & location of the welcome file; also as it did not have any index.html or index.jsp so we got a page not found instead of the welcome page.

When the same application was deployed in exploded format, the welcome page came up as desired.

3. For shutting down the weblogic servers using "kill -9" unix command is not a good practice. Same holds true for the nodemanager.

Doing so leaves the dependency process still using the port and when we try to bring up the killed process we get "BindException".

See my post for more details on the same.