Administration Portal user and group managent performace issue

Question

Hi
I have implemented a custom IPlanet LDAP authentication provider which provides
a realization for the needed authentication, group and user management interfaces
(UserReader, UserEditor, GroupReader, GroupEditor).
The authentication provider itself seems to work fine, but I think I found a possible
performance problem in the WebLogic Administration Portal, when I studied the
authentication framework by remote debugging. Response times (with just one simultaneous
user) are quite long (over 8 seconds) with 40 groups on the same hierarchy level
on the Users, Groups and Roles tree. I'm developing with P4 processor and 1 Gb
ram (512 Mb allocated for WLS)
After little debugging I found out that every time a node in the group tree is
dlicked isMember() method of the authentication provider gets called n * (n -1)
times, where n is the number of visible groups in the hierachy tree. '
What happens is that for each group, the membership of all the other visible groups
is checked by the isMember(group, member, recursive), method call. Even the usage
of a membership cache in this point didn't speed up the rendering noticeably.
By placing a break point in the isMember() method and studying the call stack,
one can see that all the isMember() calls are made during the rendering performed
by the ControlTreeWalker. For example if there is 40 groups visible in the tree,
the isMember() method gets called 1600 times. This seems quite heavy. With a
small number of groups per hierarchy level this problem might not be serious,
but in case where there would be over 30 000 customer companies using the portal
and each having their own user groups, it could be an issue.
The problem does not occur with WebLogic console and browsing of groups and users
(using the same authentication provider) is fast with it. When a user is selected
from the user list and the Groups tab is checked, the Possible Groups and Current
Groups list boxes will get populated. When debugging this sequence, one can see
that only the listGroups() method of the authentication provider is called once
per list box and the order of method calls is of order n (rather than n^2 which
is the case with the Administrator Portal).
Has anyone had similar problems with Administrator Portal's performance?
Ville

Answer 1

Ville,
You're correct about the performance degradation issue. This is being
addressed in SP2.
Thanks,
Phil
"Ville" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
Hi
I have implemented a custom IPlanet LDAP authentication provider whichprovides
a realization for the needed authentication, group and user managementinterfaces
(UserReader, UserEditor, GroupReader, GroupEditor).
The authentication provider itself seems to work fine, but I think I founda possible
performance problem in the WebLogic Administration Portal, when I studiedthe
authentication framework by remote debugging. Response times (with justone simultaneous
user) are quite long (over 8 seconds) with 40 groups on the same hierarchylevel
on the Users, Groups and Roles tree. I'm developing with P4 processor and1 Gb
ram (512 Mb allocated for WLS)
After little debugging I found out that every time a node in the grouptree is
dlicked isMember() method of the authentication provider gets called n *(n -1)
times, where n is the number of visible groups in the hierachy tree. '
What happens is that for each group, the membership of all the othervisible groups
is checked by the isMember(group, member, recursive), method call. Eventhe usage
of a membership cache in this point didn't speed up the renderingnoticeably.
>
By placing a break point in the isMember() method and studying the callstack,
one can see that all the isMember() calls are made during the renderingperformed
by the ControlTreeWalker. For example if there is 40 groups visible inthe tree,
the isMember() method gets called 1600 times. This seems quite heavy.With a
small number of groups per hierarchy level this problem might not beserious,
but in case where there would be over 30 000 customer companies using theportal
and each having their own user groups, it could be an issue.
The problem does not occur with WebLogic console and browsing of groupsand users
(using the same authentication provider) is fast with it. When a user isselected
from the user list and the Groups tab is checked, the Possible Groups andCurrent
Groups list boxes will get populated. When debugging this sequence, onecan see
that only the listGroups() method of the authentication provider is calledonce
per list box and the order of method calls is of order n (rather than n^2which
is the case with the Administrator Portal).
Has anyone had similar problems with Administrator Portal's performance?
Ville