NON-transactional session bean access entity bean

Question

We are currently profiling our product using Borland OptmizeIt tool, and we
found some interesting issues. Due to our design, we have many session beans which
are non transactional, and these session beans will access entity beans to do
the reading operations, such as getWeight, getRate, since it's read only, there
is no need to do transaction commit stuff which really takes time, this could
be seen through the profile. I know weblogic support readonly entity bean, but
it seems that it only has benefit on ejbLoad call, my test program shows that
weblogic still creates local transaction even I specified it as transaction not
supported, and Transaction.commit() will always be called in postInvoke(), from
the profile, we got that for a single method call, such as getRate(), 80% time
spent on postInvoke(), any suggestion on this? BTW, most of our entity beans are
using Exclusive lock, that's the reason that we use non-transactional session
bean to avoid dead lock problem.
Thanks

Answer 1

Slava,
Thanks for the link, actually I read it before, and following is what I extracted
it from the doc:
<weblogic-doc>
Do not set db-is-shared to "false" if you set the entity bean's concurrency
strategy to the "Database" option. If you do, WebLogic Server will ignore the
db-is-shared setting.
</weblogic-doc>
Thanks
"Slava Imeshev" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Jinsong,
You may want to read this to get more detailed explanation
on db-is-shared (cache-between-transactions for 7.0):
http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs61/ejb/EJB_environment.html#1127563
Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Slava Imeshev
"Jinsong HU" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Thanks.
But it's still not clear to me in db-is-shared setting, if I specifiedentity
lock as database lock, I assumed db-is-shared is useless, because foreach
new
transaction, entity bean will reload data anyway. Correct me if I amwrong.
Jinsong
"Slava Imeshev" <[email protected]> wrote:
Jinsong,
See my answers inline.
"Jinsong Hu" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hi Slava,
Thanks for your reply, actually, I agree with you, we need to
review
our db
schema and seperate business logic to avoid db lock. I can not say,guys,
we need
to change this and that, since it's a big application and developedsince
EJB1.0
spec, I think they are afraid to do such a big change.Total rewrite is the worst thing that can happen to an app. The
better aproach would be identifying the most critical piece and
make a surgery on it.
Following are questions in my mind:
(1) I think there should be many companies using weblogic serverto
develop
large enterprise applications, I am just wondering what's the maintransaction/lock
mechanism that is used? Transional session / database lock,
db-is-shared
entity
I can't say for the whole community, as for my experience the standard
usage patthern is session fasades calling Entity EJBs while having
Required TX attribute plus plain transacted JDBC calls for bulk
reads or inserts.
is the dominant one? It seems that if you speficy database lock,
the
db-is-shared
should be true, right?Basically it's not true. One will need db-is-shared only if thereare
changes
to the database done from outside of the app server.
(2) For RO bean, if I specify read-idle-timeout to 0, it shouldonly
load
once at the first use time, right?I assume read-timeout-seconds was meant. That's right, but if
an application constantly reads new RO data, RO beans will be
constantly dropped from cache and new ones will be loaded.
You may want to looks at server console to see if there's a lot
of passivation for RO beans.
(3) For clustering part, have anyone use it in real enterpriseapplication?
My concern, since database lock is the only way to choose, how aboutthe
affect
of ejbLoad to performance, since most transactions are short live,if high
volume
transactions are in processing, I am just scared to death about
the
ejbLoad overhead.
ejbLoad is a part of bean's lifecycle, how would you be scared ofit?
If ejbLoads take too much time, it could be a good idea to profile
used SQLs. Right index optimization can make huge difference.
Also you may want cosider using CMP beans to let weblogic
take care about load optimization.
(4) If using Optimization lock, all the ejbStore need to do
version
check
or timestamp check, right? How about this overhead?As for optimistic concurrency, it performs quite well as you can
use lighter isolation levels.
HTH,
Slava Imeshev
"Jinsong Hu" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
We are using Exclusive Lock for entity bean, because of we do
not
want
to
load
data in each new transaction. If we use Database lock, that means
we
dedicate
data access calls to database, if database deadlock happens,
it's
hard
to
detect,
while using Exclusive lock, we could detect this dead lock in
container
level.
The problem is, using Exclusive concurrency mode you serialize
access to data represented by the bean. This aproach has negative
effect on ablity of application to process concurrent requests.As
a
result the app may have performance problems under load.
Actually, at the beginnning, we did use database lock and usingtransactional
The fact that you had database deadlocking issues tells that
application logic / database schema may need some review.
Normally to avoid deadlocking it's good to group database
operations mixing in updattes and inserts into one place so
that db locking sequence is not spreaded in time. Moving to
forced serialized data access just hides design/implementation
problems.
session bean, but the database dead lock and frequent ejbLoad
really
kill
us,
so we decided to move to use Exclusive lock and to avoid dead
lock,
we
change
some session bean to non-transactional.Making session beans non-transactions makes container
creating short-living transactions for each call to entity bean
methods. It's a costly process and it puts additional load to
both container and database.
We could use ReadOnly lock for some entity beans, but since weblogicserver will
always create local transaction for entity bean, and we found
transaction
commit
is expensive, I am arguing why do we need create container leveltransaction for
read only bean.First, read-only beans still need to load data. Also, you may seeRO
beans
contanly loading data if db-is-shared set to true. Other reason
can
be
that
RO semantics is not applicable the data presented by RO bean (forinstance,
you have a reporting engine that constantly produces "RO" data,
while
application-consumer of that data retrieves only new data and neverasks
for "old" data). RO beans are good when there is a relatively stable
data
accessed repeatedly for read only access.
You may want to tell us more about your app, we may be of help.
Regards,
Slava Imeshev
I will post the performance data, let's see how costful
transaction.commit
is.
"Cameron Purdy" <[email protected]> wrote:
We are currently profiling our product using Borland
OptmizeIt
tool,
and we
found some interesting issues. Due to our design, we have
many
session
beans which
are non transactional, and these session beans will access
entity
beans
to
do
the reading operations, such as getWeight, getRate, since
it's
read
only,
there
is no need to do transaction commit stuff which really takes
time,
this
could
be seen through the profile. I know weblogic support readonly
entity
bean,
but
it seems that it only has benefit on ejbLoad call, my test
program
shows
that
weblogic still creates local transaction even I specified
it
as
transaction not
supported, and Transaction.commit() will always be called
in
postInvoke(),
from
the profile, we got that for a single method call, such as
getRate(),
80%
time
spent on postInvoke(), any suggestion on this? BTW, most of
our
entity
beans are
using Exclusive lock, that's the reason that we use
non-transactional
session
bean to avoid dead lock problem.I am worried that you have made some decisions based on an improper
understand of what WebLogic is doing.
First, you say "non transactional", but from your description
you
should
have those marked as tx REQUIRED to avoid multiple transactions
(since
non-transactional just means that the database operation becomesits
own
little transaction).
Second, you say you are using exclusive lock, which you shouldonly
use
if
you are absolutely sure that you need it, (and note that it
does
not
work in
a cluster).
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
http://www.tangosol.com/coherence.jsp
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Replicated Cache for Weblogic
"Jinsong Hu" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
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