Lightweight WebLogic development environment

Question

We just started a project in ADF, Oracle's Java EE framework. Usually we develop in Tomcat, then deploy into the production WebLogic servers.

But we realized ADF requires a WebLogic server installed locally to develop in Eclipse/JDeveloper. This is really heavyweight, even configured as dev, it is killing our machines, and taking a long time to deploy.

So, are there any configuration parameters we could tweak so WebLogic takes as few resources as possible? Are there any alternatives we could use?

We are mostly concerned about memory (it is taking a wonderful 800MB,) and startup time (~2 minutes)

Answer 1

On the memory consumption issue, you might want to try setting the memory parameters of the JVM used by your WebLogic server. Log in to your WL Web Admin Console and go to Environment/Servers/[your server]/Configuration/Server Start and, on the "Arguments", setting something like -Xms256m -Xmx256m will set your JVM's initial (Xms) and maximum (Xmx) heap size to 256 megabytes. You will want to play around with these numbers and find the best values for your environment. But please be aware that your Eclipse instance might be consuming a lot of memory as well.

Regarding the startup time, although a bit larger than I would expect, they seem OK. This problem is very frequent, and I don't think you will be able to definitely solve it. WebLogic has much more features than Tomcat, and this reflects in other characteristics of the environment (like startup time). You might find some useful tips here, though: Speed up Weblogic Server startup times