Tuning Remedy Mid Tier

This section provides instructions for optimizing the performance of the Mid Tier as a web application from the server, browser, and network perspectives.

The topics are:

• Fine tuning the web infrastructure for the Mid Tier
• Fine tuning the web stack
• Fine tuning the mid tier web application
• Browser hardware requirements and settings
• Mid tier case studies

To ensure that Mid Tier components are configured correctly, see  https://selfservice.bmc.com/casemgmt/sc_KnowledgeArticle?sfdcid=000120022

The web component for the Remedy AR System platform is the Remedy Mid Tier (the Mid Tier). The Mid Tier’s main function is to transform a Remedy AR System application into a web application accessible through a web browser. You can categorize the Mid Tier as a web application because it delivers web contents to browser requests and is deployable on any J2EE-compliant servlet engine. However, the Mid Tier is not a web application in the strict sense because it does not contain resources to fulfill any browser use cases. All contents delivered by the Mid Tier to fulfill web use cases (with the exception of platform level resources) are dynamically derived from the Remedy AR System applications that are deployed on the AR System server to which the Mid Tier is configured.

The Mid Tier is a web application that conforms to the J2EE Servlet 2.3 specification. It can be deployed on a wide range of web application servers or servlet engines as specified in the AR System server compatibility matrix (http://www.bmc.com/support_home).

Apache Tomcat is the default servlet engine included with the Remedy AR System installer. The advantage of using Tomcat is that it is open source and it performs as well as other application servers or servlet engines under most deployment conditions. It also has a much smaller memory footprint because it is not a full J2EE application server.

You need to fine tune the web infrastructure separately because properties such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) parameters, servlet engine thread configurations, network optimizations, and some HTTP protocol parameters are not controlled at the web application level. These parameters are set at the web infrastructure level.

Additionally, the overall web use case performance is also dependent on the client hardware. The section Browser hardware requirements and settings discusses the client hardware hosting the browser. The hardware must meet certain requirements so that the UI rendering and JavaScript executions are timely since the Mid Tier web application relies heavily on dynamic UI layout and JavaScript execution.

Lastly, as with most web applications, the web contents delivered by the Mid Tier are serviced with browser cache directives issued for faster use case execution time. If the security settings in the browser are incorrectly set resulting in the disabling of the browser’s caching mechanism, the use case times as executed by the given browser are adversely affected.