Pimp my websphere ... Reduce WebSphere Application Server startup time

If you do a lot of JEE application development on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and cannot afford Rational Application Developer, you will often find yourself restarting WAS and wondering why you have to deal with restarting the server all the time. Why not save some time and develop on Tomcat or some other app server. As a developer in WAS, I face the same issues.

To help with this situation here is a cheat sheet to reduce your application server stop and start time. PLEASE NOTE THIS ADVICE IS ONLY MEANT WHEN DEVELOPING IN A SANDBOX environment. Some of these tips are illegal in 24 states... <just kiddin!>

1. Turn ON parallel start of the server. (default is true). Start the server on multiple threads. To view this administrative console page, click Servers > Application servers > server_name.

2. Server Component Provisioning: Start components when needed. Components started as they are needed by an application that is running on this server.

3. Run in development mode. Specifies that you want to use the JVM properties -Xverify and -Xquickstart on startup. Before selecting this option, add the -Xverify and -Xquickstart properties as generic arguments to the JVM configuration.

4. Set the JVM -Xms option equal to -Xmx to a value that is equal to your working set of your heap. Usually 1024MB is enough for development. Look at JVM tuning.

5. Uninstall all applications you don't need. Including system applications like the WebSphere admin console.

If uninstall is not an option then disable automatic start of applications.

wsadmin.sh –f deployConsole.py remove

6. Disable admin and application security.

7. Turn OFF the PMI service. PMI data collection is used to diagnose problems and tune application performance.

8. Turn OFF ODC Service. See APAR  PM07711: Allow the initialization of the On Demand Configuration component to be bypassed

9. Turn off the Dynacache Service in WAS v8 if you are NOT using caching. This is only possible in WAS v8.

10. Disable the WebSphere Application Server service log/activity log. This service is not essential to WAS and very few system administrator make use of the activity / service log. See on how to disable this service. This is the default in WAS v8.


11. Disable HAManager.  If none of the HA manager related services are being leveraged by your 
application or environment, the service can be disabled to eliminate the associated overhead.