Does a war file size affect in some way the application and/or application server performance?

Question

we've bean struggling here at work by somebody suggestion that we should decrease the size of our war file, specifically the WEB-INF/lib directory size, in order to improve our production JBoss instance performance. Something I'm still suspicious about.

We have around 15 web apps deploy in our application server, each about 15 to 20 MB in size.

I know there are a lot of variables involved on this, but has anyone of you actually deal with this situation? Does the .war files size actually has a significant impact on web containers in general?

What advice can you offer?

Thank U.

Answer 1

There are many things to be suspicious of here:

• What about the application is not performing to the level you would like?
• Have you measured the application to find out which components are causing the lack of performance?
• What are the bottlenecks in the application/system?

The size of the application alone has nothing to do with any sort of runtime performance. The number of classes loaded during the lifetime of the application has an impact on memory usage of the application, but an incredibly negligible one.

When dealing with "performance issues", the solution always follows the same general steps:

• What does it mean when we say "bad performance"?
• What specifically is not performing? Measure, measure, measure.
• Can we improve the specific component not performing to the level we want?
• If so, implement the ideas, measure again to find out if performance has truly improved.