Allowing longer web session going through Apache to Websphere Application Server

Had a tough one last month when migrating the system to WAS. I’m still new to WAS, hit a few problems and take this chance to document down so that this form my reference and hopefully it help you too.

Users has been complaining that the web service keep getting time out, returning a 500 error.

What i found out was that i can actually, tune the “ServerIOTimeout” parameter in the WAS plugin for Apache beyond the default. i used 900, which is 15min in seconds.

In addition,a little performance fine tuning was done using “LoadBalanceWeight” to keep the application servers from being ‘hit’ random when they are just started up, especially when i have a cluster of them. As recommended by IBM specialist, i used some numbers, with one of the application server assigned to an odd number, different from the rest.

The idea is to make one of the application server the first one to serve, instead of randomising it.

Server CloneID=”179d3la” ConnectTimeout=”5″ ExtendedHandshake=”false” LoadBalanceWeight=”20″ MaxConnections=”-1″ Name=”Node1″ ServerIOTimeout=”900″ WaitForContinue=”false”
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Server CloneID=”179d5sb” ConnectTimeout=”5″ ExtendedHandshake=”false” LoadBalanceWeight=”20″ MaxConnections=”-1″ Name=”Node2″ ServerIOTimeout=”900″ WaitForContinue=”false”
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Server CloneID=”179d8gc” ConnectTimeout=”5″ ExtendedHandshake=”false” LoadBalanceWeight=”21″ MaxConnections=”-1″ Name=”Node3″ ServerIOTimeout=”900″ WaitForContinue=”false”
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Do let me know if you have better ideas of solving it.