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Sizing Guidelines for the Web Application Server

Sizing recommendations vary according to your chosen web application server. The following guidelines refer to Tomcat.

Concurrent user sessions and requests

One Tomcat service using one CPU can typically support up to 400 concurrent user sessions, and between 50 and 75 concurrent requests (dependent on the complexity of workload.)

Memory requirements

Tomcat typically requires between 500MB and 1.5GB of memory, depending on load. We recommend that you allow at least 250MB of unused physical memory to help Tomcat use contiguous memory.

If Tomcat is running on a VM, all of this memory requirement must be dedicated to the VM.

We recommend that you use 64 bit hardware for better scalability.

JVM configuration tips

To configure the Tomcat JVM, click Start, Tomcat, Tomcat Configuration, Java.

MaxMemoryPool setting

For largescale production systems, you may need to increase this setting from the default level of 1024MB.

On 32 bit hardware, do not set MaxMemoryPool to more than 1.2GB to avoid potential issues. (You may be able to raise this setting to 1.4GB if you are using the most recent operating system and Java versions.)

On 64 bit hardware, you can set MaxMemoryPool to a higher level. But if the required heap size reaches 1.5GB, you may need to implement load balancing with extra Tomcat services.

ThreadStackSize setting

We recommend that you set this setting to 1024KB.

InitialMemoryPool setting

The JVM perfers to use contiguous blocks of memory. It can therefore help performance if you set the JVM InitialMemoryPool size to the observed average working size of the virtual machine.

Important: Only do this if that amount of memory is guaranteed to be always available. (If this memory Is not available, the WebIntelligence processing service cannot start.)