WebSphere Application Server V7.0: Concepts ... - IBM Redbooks

5.1.5 Performance
Performance determines the environment’s ability to process work in a given
interval. The higher the performance, the smaller the interval needed to process
a specified set of work, or the more work that can be processed in the same
interval.
When talking about performance there are two widely used approaches:
► Response time
Response time is a generic approach for a single type of request. It defines
the maximum amount of time a request should take until it is finished. This
metric is most often used in online workload, where a request has to achieve
a real-time goal.
Note: When using this metric make sure that the response time is not only
achieved in a single user-single transaction scenario, but also when the
projected production load is used against the system.
► Throughput
The throughput metric measures the overall amount of work processed in a
certain amount of time. It is usually used for batch-kind workloads that need
to be finished in a certain time window.
WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment enables you to cluster
application servers so that you have multiple server instances running the same
application available to handle incoming requests. Clustering generally provides
improvements for performance, due to an optimized scaling.
Chapter 5. Topologies 127