How to Speed Up IBM Rational Application Developer/Rational Software Architect

Question

I want to know how can I speed up RSA 7.5( which is an IDE by IBM having eclipse under the hood with websphere server runtimes) mainly server start. The first time I start it after computer reboot it loads after, but after that it takes for ever to start/stop the server. The debug mode for server takes for ever to start.

I am using server 7 run time for IBM RSA 7.5.

So bascially RAD/RSA has websphere run times which allows to configure the server runtime start/stop within RAD/RSA. The run time allows you to develop webapps and test time on the server on deploy it on the websphere run time.

The problem I am facing is with the websphere runtime which works fine after computer reboot but is very slow after several deployments/publishing of the same web app.

I would be grateful you give performance tips for speed up RSA server start/shutdown and overall performance tips. I have plenty of memory like 12 GB with i7 Core 6 cores on Win7.

Answer 1

Of course of your are running the server in debug mode it's going to be a lot slower, but you have a few options like putting the server in development mode or doing some fine tuning as to which applications should start. Take a look at these articles:

• Rational Application Developer Performance Tips- Case study: Tuning WebSphere Application Server V7 and V8 for performance
• Performance tuning WebSphere Application Server 7 on AIX 6.1
• WebSphere tuning for the impatient: How to get 80% of the performance improvement with 20% of the effort
• WebSphere Performance Monitoring & Tuning

Some of these are a bit dated but they have some good information that may still be relevent to your issues; especially the first one.

Answer 2

Make sure that the workspaces are stored on a local disk.

edit - forgot this: buy a SSD disk. It makes a huge difference when developing.

If you have a virus scanner, disable on-access scan in the SDP installation directory including the server plugin, and in all your workspaces.

Uninstall any applications (ears) you are not using - the more you have installed the longer the server takes to startup. If your server is taking too long to start, RAD/RSA will assume it has timed out and stop it before it finishes starting - if this happens then increase the start timeout limit by double-clicking your server in the Servers tab and modifying the values in the Timeouts section.

Oh, and If you have a lot of datasources defined, and autostarting connection pools with alot of connections, it may also take a while to start the pools.

But that can't explain it all... I haven't tested, but since WAS and RSA seems to spend a lot of time doing absolutely nothing, I am starting to suspect it's trying to download schemas or something. If you have the time, you could try to trace and see if you find something like that...

Answer 3

I came across this post while trying to troubleshoot my RSA performance. I figured I would update it with a recommendation for improving performance on RSA 8.0.4.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/radhelp/v8/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.performance.doc/topics/cperformance.html has some excellent tips on improving performance in the "Performance Tips" section. After implementing just some of the "Always" tips I've found my memory reducing significantly and performance being much faster.

You should start with the "Always" tips and then move to the "Sometimes" and "Rarely" ones for finer tuning.