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Basic Concepts
Designing a GemStone Application: an Overview
How should transactions be handled?
Another decision you need to make involves transactions: when to commit and
how to handle the occasional failure to commit. Do you want to use locks to
ensure a successful commit? If so, identify the places in your application where
you must acquire the locks. Concurrency control and locking are discussed in
more detail in Chapter 6.
How can performance be improved?
If— after you have built your application— you find that its performance does not
meet your expectations, you have a variety of ways to improve matters.
One of the most powerful single things you can do to improve performance is to
move some of the behavior from Smalltalk into GemStone and let the GemStone
execution engine do the work. This approach reduces network traffic, which is a
prime cause of slow performance.
Which methods might best be executed in GemStone? GemStone already contains
behavior for many of the common Smalltalk kernel classes and, as mentioned
earlier, the syntax and class hierarchy of GemStone’s Smalltalk language are so
similar to those of Smalltalk that the porting effort is likely to be relatively simple.
Performance issues in general are discussed in Chapter 9. Moving execution into
GemStone is discussed in the section entitled “Locus of Execution” on page 9-2.
That chapter also discusses the configuration parameters that can be altered to
improve GemBuilder’s performance. GemBuilder’s configuration parameters are
described in the section called “Configuring GemBuilder” on page 9-5. Chapter 9
also explains how to use GemBuilder’s Settings Browser to tune your system for
maximum performance, given the details of your application and environment.
Finally, you can configure the GemStone object server for maximum performance,
given the details of your application and environment. GemStone configuration
parameters are discussed in detail in the GemStone System Administration Guide; in
addition, the GemStone Programming Guide gives a variety of tips in the chapter
entitled “Tuning Performance.”
December 2001
GemStone Systems, Inc.
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