Performance tuning

Let us have some information about tuning concept to be introduced during performance testing. In my scenario, the number of users were supported by the application was only 18. Beyond this number all users were failing to logging with the "Database Related Error". The error that I was getting was "Couldn't create Database Instance". [looks like it is a Database related error]
When I started looking into this issue, we had few areas that we could look for the solution. They were:
1. Connection Pools
2. Tomcat (if tomcat is the Web Server)
3. OS system file
4. Hardware resources

I encountered this issue on Solaris box. I started finding the solution for this issue and below are areas I looked into:

1. I started looking at the Application Server Connection pools issue. We had few parameters in the web.xml file under the middle-tier where min_connex and max_connex parameter was defined related to the Database. These parameters were set to 2 and 5 respectively. The best way to start finding the solutions for any issue is the log that is being written. In the middle-tier log, out of 4, 3 connection pools were always idle. So, there was no problem at the middle-tier side.

2. I tried increasing the tomcat memory from 512MB to 1024MB in catalina.sh file. This didn't resolve the issue.

3. Looked into the /etc/System file on the Solaris OS and saw some parameters like maxusers, maxuproc (maximum user processes). Setting maxusers to a value will control max_nprocs and maxuprc. The algorithms are:
max_nprocs = 10 + (16 x maxusers)
maxuprc = max_nprocs – reserved_procs (default is 5)
Even this setting didn't resolve the issue.

4. last but not the least, I looked into the System resources and found that the root path (i.e. "/") doesn't have much disk space to allocate DB resources any more beyond 18 users. Since the Oracle was setup at "/" path and the Oracle folder wasn't assigned any more system resources, Oracle was utilizing the space allocated to "/". Due to in-sufficient disk space on "/" path, users were not able to make connection with the Oracle DB and hence was failing.
Increasing the root disk space eliminated the issue with the user login.

Hope this was a good article to understand the tuning concept applied before looking into in details of performance tuning.