Introduction

JVM manages memory for us so that we can focus on writing our applications. It is pretty good at it too, but it cannot fully optimize its behavior while running programs. To help it, we can give it explicit rules to follow as well as hints on how to operate. Unfortunately, the number of options available for these hints and rules is wide ranging and not always fully documented.

In this chapter, we will explore some of the options available to us and look at how we can monitor the effect they have on your SOA Suite installation. This will allow us to analyze its behavior at runtime and monitor the effect of our applied tuning options. We will look at options for the HotSpot and JRockit JVMs (for more details on making a selection between the two, see the Using the Oracle JRockit JVM recipe in Chapter 6, Platform Tuning end parenthesis.

Memory management is a combination of art and science—more is not always better, and so, selecting your memory settings should always be performed...