Customer Reviews

Maximizing Performance and Scalability with IBM WebSphere

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
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This book great to read from cover to cover, as well as simply using it as a reference guide. As some one who is familiar with the WebSphere platform, but new to performance tuning, I found that the topics where laid out in a very easy to understand progression.

I appreciate the first chapter as it builds the case for performance tuning. The examples given are 'real world'. They show how costly a project can get over time if you just "throw hardware" at a performance problem. This is a no brainer for most people that will read this book. However, all the dollar figures and numbers are great to bring to decision makers before a project begins to help you build a case for budgeting and planning for performance -before production!

It is very nice to finally find a book that compares and contrasts the different architectures of WAS 4 and WAS 5. Adam Neat describes each component in both versions 4 and 5, and how they are different.

This book is probably not for someone who is just getting started with WebSphere. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who is comfortable with the administration of WebSphere, and needs to learn the art of performance tuning. You won't be disappointed.

I found this book promising but extremely disappointing. Websphere has a lot of tools available for performance monitoring, but this books only mentions the most obvious of these in the last 14 pages. This is typical of the book, where it tends to address how to tune hardware and Windows / UNIX, but not WebSphere or even the JVM.

For an excellent introduction to WebSphere Prrformance see: Barcia, Roland et al. IBM WebSphere: Deployment and Advanced Configuration. Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN: 0131468626.

For performance and scalability, see: Roehm, Birgit et al. IBM WebSphere V5.1 Performance, Scalability, and High Availability WebSphere Handbook Series. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246198.pdf

For Scalability, also see: IBM. WebSphere Scalability: WLM and Clustering Using WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG246153.html

WebSphere is one of IBM's core software offerings, on a par with DB2. Accordingly, IBM has built up a huge portfolio of functionality in WebSphere. And it has published a series of books explaining its usage. By definition, these books should be considered authoritative.

So why should you even look at Neat's book? For one thing, he offers a different viewpoint on explaining what you can do with WebSphere. Remember that most users of WebSphere are companies that will have to invest considerable time and money in understanding and using it. Simply having a second written opinion on a particular aspect may help your understanding. And the cost of that (ie. the cost of this book) is trivial compared to the time it might save you. Let alone the cost of bringing in a consultant.

Another reason for the book's utility is simply that Neat is independent of IBM. It gives him greater flexibility to make objective assessments; particularly if some of these are negative.

One consequence of his independence is that the book devotes substantial space to issues involved in running WebSphere on Sun machines. Now IBM does offer WebSphere across a wide range of hardware. Naturally, including their own servers. To the best of my recollection, their WebSphere books simply do not give the extensive Sun coverage you will find here. Neat gives a realistic acknowledgement of the market presence of Sun for web applications.

Adam's book explains concepts and viewpoint which were not very much prevalent/known during 2003..I am writing this review in 2011. Recently designed a system and to my surprise we used almost similar concepts that Adam laid out in 2003. So a great book..and certainly not for the masses. This book is meant only for advanced level administrators, engineers or architects.

Now the "Correction"..

Page 275 "windows standard filesystem doesn't provide the same level of functionality as UNIX counterparts..". This statement is more around, as stated by author, I/O fencing or storage compartmentalization...Author states that if you want add more disks in Windows you need to add more Drives (D:, E:, .... ).

This is not true though...you can mount disks in windows exactly the same way as in UNIX at any level in the filesystem hierarchy. Just that windows gives you an additional thought process that..in UNIX you have only one root (i.e. "/") but in windows there can be multiple roots (c:, d: etc.. all of them start at the same logical level of the filesystem hierarchy).

Book is more than good and informative. Most of the concepts are still applicable. And yes those factual things like WAS4/5 or UltraSCSI etc..not much relevant now. This book can also be used as guide and is almost applicable to any other J2EE application server (weblogic, jboss etc..). with little thinking you can even use it for non-application server oriented software.

Hopefully Adam writes a new book or a 2nd Ed to this wonderful work.