I’ve been playing around with researching ORDS over the summer particularly trying to optimize performance on Tomcat. Trying something a little different I’ve created a Vagrant box that should allow anybody interested to verify my findings, find mistakes I’ve made or identify performance optimizations I’ve missed.
If you’re new to Vagrant, Tim Hall provides a good introduction for the Oracle DBA.
You can clone or download the Vagrant box from my github page hopefully the instructions should be clear, you need to download Oracle 18cXE and ORDS releases and put into the software directory. I’ve allocated 6GB RAM and 4 CPUs to the virtual machine, you may need to adjust these values depending on your test machine resources. Doing “vagrant up” should automatically configure the database, and configure ORDS running in Tomcat and with some reverse proxies. It will also generate a self-signed certificate and configure the SSL handling in both Tomcat and the reverse proxies. Most of the database and ORDS configuration scripts were taken from the Oracle Vagrant boxes or Tim’s Vagrant boxes.
The bench-marking tool I am using is Siege. There are many alternatives available but I chose Siege for a few reasons. Firstly it is Free and Open Source software. Secondly it is easy to configure, simply populate a file, urls.txt, with the URLs to hit and then run the executable with suitable parameters. Finally it is lightweight, being written in C, whereas many other similar tools are written in Java, as I am running the bench-marking tool on the same virtual machine that hosts the software components I’m trying to measure this is important.
Once the vagrant machine is up, you can connect to it via “vagrant ssh” and then type “ords-demo” to run the entire test-suite. I’ll go through the individual tests in the following blog posts and share my findings.