JADE Design Tips for Better Performance

This document contains specific design and coding hints and tips for JADE developers. It is organized by area rather than in order of importance.

For guidance in analyzing the performance of a JADE system, refer to the Performance Analysis white paper.

This is not an exhaustive discussion of the subject, and is intended to provide understanding and guidance, and perhaps encourage the motivation to research other techniques as the need arises.

There is a lot of information in this white paper. It may pay to come back in a few months' time and peruse it again. Other things will likely jump out at you then. You should read this along with Part 4, "Design Considerations", in the Erewhon Demonstration System Reference that is also available from the JADE-Erewhon link at https://github.com/jadesoftwarenz.

This white paper is relevant to JADE 7.0 and higher, including JADE 2020. In earlier releases, a number of mechanisms operated differently, and it is likely that many may change with future releases. In particular, JADE 7.0 and higher use their own disk cache as the primary cache for database objects, while JADE 6.3 and earlier use Windows file‑system cache. In addition, JADE 7.0 and higher support much better concurrency between multiple processes within a node. The comparison with JADE 6.3 is still useful because many systems were initially configured for JADE 6.3 or earlier, and have not been updated since.

For more details, see the following subsections.