Update on TPV performance issue over VPN
Posted by Vivek Agarwal on April 8, 2007
Last week, in talking to Andrew (a colleague of mine who is an Oracle DBA), I discovered the probable cause for our performance issues with Tivoli Performance Viewer (TPV) over a VPN connection. He mentioned to me that using Oracle Enterprise Manager console over X-Windows has significant performance issues because of an issue with Java applications that use X for graphics. At that point, it clicked to me that TPV certainly falls in that category of applications and the explanation is certainly plausible. Unfortunately, I have not been able to validate this issue yet given that I have been swamped and am off to Africa on 9th April for a couple of weeks.
Essentially the crux of the issue is the fact that Java X-Window applications are not very disciplined about network calls and end up creating way too much network traffic, slowing screen refreshes to a crawl. There are two potential workarounds to this issue -
1) Run the Java X-Window application locally – copy the class/jar files to your local box and run the application locally so that the X graphics updates do not go across the network.
2) Run a VNC server on the remote box and connect using a VNC client. Supposedly this helps significantly with performance of the graphic updates.
Hopefully, either I or somebody from my team will be able to validate option 2 and get back to you whether this actually helps out with TPV in reality as I expect it to!
