Dramatically reduce SOA Suite 11g startup time by cleaning the MDS

SOA Suite can sometimes be a bit slow to start. This is especially the case when there are a lot of composites to load. Customers using different versions of composites can benefit from undeploying non-default revisions of processes which do not have any running instances (see for example here). Undeployment in most cases is an asynchronous process which does not give feedback. It can partially fail without you noticing (apparently not an atomic transaction). This sometimes leaves composite remains; parts of the composite which are still loaded at startup but are not visible from the Enterprise Manager. Removing these can dramatically reduce server startup time. Especially in an environment which has been used for some time and environments with many versions of composites. Reducing the time required to get the soa-infra application fully up and running is of course mostly relevant for 11g SOA installations and less for 12.1.3 (which does some lazy loading) and 12.2.1 (which supports parallel deployments, also during server start-up).

In this article I'll demonstrate how these left-over composite parts can be identified and removed on an 11.1.1.7 SOA environment. First try this procedure on a development or test environment before executing it in production! This method is not supported by Oracle (or me) in any way and using it is entirely at your own risk. If something breaks, tell me so I can update this article. Thanks!

Please mind that these actions, although they help with the start time and memory usage of your SOA environment, have less impact on run-time performance than for example purging of instances and reducing the amount of deployed composites (or tweaking datasources, soa-infra database, JVM, etc).

SOA Suite can be up quickly!

A first look at Splunk. Monitor Oracle SOA Suite service response times

Measuring performance of services can be done in various ways. In this blog I will describe a method of measuring Oracle SOA service response times with Splunk a popular monitoring tool. In order to monitor service response times with Splunk, Splunk needs to obtain its data from somewhere. In this example I'll use the HTTP access log which I expand with a time-taken field. Disclaimer; my experience with Splunk is something like 2 hours. This might also be an indication of what can quickly be achieved with Splunk with little knowledge.