Websphere 7 is way too slow what have you done to make it publish faster?

Question

Publishing a change in websphere 7 takes longer than it does to change a tire.

Even just making a change to a jsp is taking 7-10 minutes.

I have scoured the internet to find out how to overcome this.

I have installed the latest fix pack 11 (at the time of this writing)

I have added the metadata-complete="true" to the web.xml web-app tag since I don't use annotations.(see the last attribute below)

<web-app id="WebApp_ID" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" 
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" 
         version="2.5" metadata-complete="true">

I have tried adding all my jar files to the manifest.mf

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Class-Path:
Ignore-Scanning-Archives: mylibjar.jar, myotherlibjar.jar ...

This method is so wrong because there is a character limit when you add to many and it spits out a java.io.IOException: line too long error.

I also heard that you can just add all of your large libraries as shared libraries in the app server so your IDE doesn't try to scan them. However this doesn't help you compile anything in an IDE when you remove the jar from your lib folder.

I have created a security domain that is a copy of the Global Security. (this stopped the never ending SSL errors I was getting) btw this is the only tweak that has had any noticeable improvement.

Then there are the obvious ones... Putting your server in development mode, Run server resources within the workspace and minimize files copied to the server....

Even after doing all of this I am still experiencing ridiculous publish times.

Has anyone else found other ways to trick this overpriced hunk o bloat to perform like something worth using at all?

Answer 1

It sounds like you're using RAD, so it's hard to tell whether WAS is the culprit here. One way to know for sure is to perform the update and watch SystemOut.log. When you see the update has completed successfully, see how much time has passed. Updates should be reasonably quick, especially with WARs.