The Sun white paper "Performance Tuning the Sun GlassFish Web Stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP") (login or registration required) is an introduction to tuning different components of the Sun GlassFish Web Stack, with a focus on Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The guide also explains how the features of Web Stack Enterprise Manager can identify which areas of the system to tune for a user's workload.

The white paper notes that the Web Stack is cross-platform and runs on Solaris 10 Update 5, OpenSolaris 2009.06, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, adding that GlassFish Web Stack is relocatable, which means that it can be installed anywhere on a system with or without root privileges.

GlassFish Web Stack is also well tested and ready for the enterprise, the paper continues, noting that mysql.com quickly switched to GlassFish Web Stack during emergency downtime and is extremely satisfied.

In tuning, the authors used the Olio Web 2.0 Toolkit, which contains a PHP Web application and a load driver for Faban, as the Web application to tune against. Faban is a distributed benchmarking tool that is used to drive load against the Olio Web application, while Olio is an event application that uses many Web technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), tagging, tag clouds, comments, ratings, friends, and feeds. This setup tests a file store, database layer, Web server, and caching tier.

The test harness comprised a Sun Fire X4250 M2 (64GB memory) running Apache, MySQL, and memcached on Solaris 10, along with a Sun Fire X2200 M2 load driver. One of the goals of this paper is to show how GlassFish Web Stack scales on one server. As a result, the X2200 driving the load has a direct Ethernet connection to the System Under Test (SUT) to avoid conflicts on the network.

The section on tuning (Chapter 4) describes in detail GlassFish Web Stack tunings made for the system architecture described in the paper and explains how to identify what to tune.

Each of the elements of the Web Stack under consideration -- Apache, PHP and MySQL -- is treated in a separate section, which is followed by a section on GlassFish Enterprise Manager that demonstrates how that solution provides a perspective into the system.

A final section presents tuning results and configurations for each of the three Web Stack elements. Abundant code samples are included throughout the text.

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