Introduction
This section provides information related to the tuning of IBM® Cúram Social Program Management (SPM) deployed on cloud environments such as the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).
The configurable parameters and tuning values listed are for guidance purposes only. These configurable parameters and values are a suggested starting point and are not definitive. Clients should perform their own testing to validate and verify their own settings, in order to meet their system needs.
While the starter configurable parameters and values are based on experience and are sensible for production, it is unlikely they are the configuration for your specific system. Therefore, it is strongly recommended these configurations are further tuned during your load testing and production monitoring.
The parameters are key to the performance of Social Program Management on WebSphere® Liberty (WLP) application server running on Kubernetes. Refine the values during load testing of the system and during monitoring of production. A load test phase in the project is highly recommended.
Architecture
As a platform for Social Programs, SPM allows customers to configure and customize their deployments according to their own requirements.
The tuning parameters presented are for illustrative purpose only, therefore it is important to understand how the components interconnect with each other by reviewing the Architecture Overview and by performing adequate workload exercises to determine the optimal values for each deployment.
What are JMS producers and JMS consumers?
To mitigate against the risk of thread exhaustion, the client HTTP initiated transactions and JMS initiated transactions run on different WebSphere Liberty instances, integrated through a messaging engine (IBM MQ).
The Application/EAR responsible for processing client HTTP initiated transactions is called the JMS Producer and has JMS message consumption through EJB MDBs disabled.
The Application/EAR responsible for processing JMS initiated transactions is called the JMS Consumer and has JMS message consumption through EJB MDBs enabled.
This resolution is part of a multi-faceted solution, with client HTTP initiated transactions and JMS initiated transactions isolated from each other, and the implementation of local interfaces.
For more information please review the SPM Transaction isolation topic.
Helm Charts
The values and parameters presented in this document apply to the Helm Charts distributed in the SPM-Kubernetes repository.
Docker
As part of the SPM Kubernetes containerization assets release, SPM has not embedded tuning within Dockerfiles. Clients are free to update these docker files with their required tuning based on their requirements.
Passing Values
The Helm Charts expose parameters that can be accessed using the Values object, which users can override using an value file.
Consequently, in this guide the tuning of the components is made possible by passing values into the chart during deployment time.
The following command example shows a typical command to pass values during the deployment of the spm chart:
helm install spm -f override-values.yaml
Parameters
The parameters documented in this guide and in the SPM Configuration Reference are referenced in a ‘flat’ manner to allow specifying which values to amend in a readable way.
For example, the value global.images.imageTag refers to the following in an override values file:
global:images:imageTag: "latest"