Scalability of J2EE web services, how to approach?

Question

Hello, I have this web client (built entirely through a Javascript Ajax framework), that communicates with the middle tier via web service calls (3 web services are deployed on JBoss, 1 web service is deployed on Tomcat). All of the web services access the same Oracle database. The web services are built through Axis2 and Spring. All the services are deployed on 1 machine, the database on another.

I started running some SoapUI load tests, and noticed that the system starts dropping many connections once it reaches beyond the 200 concurrent users mark. What scalability approaches should I be researching in order to optimize the system to handle much larger volume of user? I know scalability is a very broad issue but, could you please provide me with a list of key areas I should start looking into and learning about?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Load balance across multiple application servers. There are several ways to do this, depending on how much you care about multi-site multi-server reliability and how much about pure performance scaling.