While developing services and business processes for Enterprise Applications Integration

using TIBCO BusinessWorks, performance always remains the top most concern and requires
utmost attention from architecture planner as well as developers.
In this post, I will explain 10 tips for performance improvement of TIBCO BW:

1. Use of FLOW LIMIT and MAX JOBS parameters are important for tuning performance of
TIBCO BW engines. If your TIBCO BusinessWorks Engine can handle peak message rates
you should consider using MaxJobs=0 and FlowLimit = 0.FLOW LIMIT parameter is used to
control the number of jobs to be created for incoming requests.

2. TIBCO BW engine thread count should also be specified in an optimized way to best
utilize the resources. Default value of 8 threads should be used initially but if CPU
resources are available and need arises; thread count should be doubled till the time
maximum CPU resources get utilized.

3. For better memory utilization and proper garbage collection,

parameter EnableMemorySavingMode=true plays a significant role. This TIBCO
BusinessWorks property allows the engine to release references to unused process data
so that it can be garbage collected by the JVM, thus improving the performance of
processes with large amounts of data.

4. JVM Heap size, garbage collection settings and Server VM vs Client VM settings are
also useful while tuning TIBCO BW performance. For small scale TIBCO envrironments,
256MB heap size is ideal but it can be changed to 512MB or 1GB or even more for medium
and large scale TIBCO environments. The total amount of JVM memory needed to operate
a TIBCO BusinessWorks Engine should be the memory for each process plus the
maximum number of processes that can be in the process pool. If flow control is enabled,
the process pool can contain up to the MaxJobs value.

5. JDBC activities used in TIBCO BW Processes require greater attention from performance
point of view as database related operations have higher delays associated. Try to use
lesser JDBC activities to the best possible way. Also, make sure that JDBC queries used
are well optimized and there arent high costs associated with these queries. Database
table locks should also be taken care of. For JDBC activities, proper timeout parameter
should be specified so that unnecessary delays are avoided.

6. Global variables should be created only when and where needed. Using excessive
Global variables results in high latency and additional memory consumption. For shared
variables, variable instantiation should be made only at process startup time
using OnStartup activity so that same data is used by all processes in the JVM.

7. Sub process calling using Call Process activity should be considered only when it is
necessary to arrange the code in a sub process. When data is mapped from parent
process to a sub process, data copy is created which has an additional cost. Memory
limitations should be kept in mind while developing sub process based TIBCO applications.
For heavy asynchronous sub-processes, SPAWN parameter should be used.
8. In the processes where FTP activities are used, session caching should be used.
Session caching can improve performance by reducing number of sessions created as
same session gets used for multiple activities for same host.

9. For SOAP over HTTP or SOAP over JMS, message size should be kept as small as
possible as heavy payloads with higher processing requirements affect the performance.

10. TRANSFORM XML activity has an added overhead associated with it as it invokes XSL
parser so it should be avoided. It is suggested to use Mapper activity instead if it can serve
the purpose. Mapper works dynamically by loading the definition in dynamic fashion which
results in better performance.