Caching Oracle 11i ERP

[sdeitric_us]

Does anyone have any experience or insight into a best practices deployment of Oracle Applications release 11i with respect to content caching at the edge for improved performance when dealing with Oracle Forms Server 6i? The goal is to improve performance through the use of Cisco caching technologies. An overview of Oracle Apps connectivity is as follows:

Step 1

URL launched from browser session via an http request. If using the dynamic html method, the Listener (currently WebDB 2.2 for 11i) calls the Forms CGI Cartridge to dynamically generate the html page. This involves replacing tokens within a base html file with parameters passed in the URL, or defaulting to values specified in the appsweb.cfg file. If load balancing is used, the Forms CGI Cartridge requests load information from the Load Balancing Server process, and uses this to dynamically modify the serverHost html parameter, so the user connects to the least loaded middle tier.

Step 2

The html page is returned to the client browser. If you view the html page source from your browser, you should see valid html / javascript and the tokens replaced with valid data.

Steps 3 and 4

Next step the browser reads the applet tags, mime types etc. in html page. It launches the Jinitiator plug-in, as defined by the mime type, to replace the browser default JDK. Jinitiator then downloads the jar files specified in the archive tag via the listener. Once the jar files have been downloaded, the Forms applet is started. Jinitiator implements jar caching and on-demand loading.

Step 5

The Forms applet is started. It reads the serverPort, serverHost, and connectMode html parameters and connects to the Forms listener, using the host, port and protocol specified. A connection is established with the Forms Listener process. A new Forms runtime process is either forked, or the next free pool process is used. The socket connection between Forms Applet and Forms Listener is handed off to the Forms runtime process, so the Applet communicates directly with the runtime process, and the listener is no longer required, except to service other new connections.

Any guidance from a Cisco technology perspective would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Steve

[mdouhan]

If you ever find out, I am very interested as we are looking to deploy the same scenario

[david.santeramo]

I was told by Oracle that I cannot cache 11i applications with 9i because they are Java based and the data is dynamic in nature. If this position has changed I would like to know.

[ltd]

Hi Steve,

As far as caching is concerned and the stages you list, the relative merits of caching will be as follows:

Step 1: will be a form-post. unfortunately not cacheable.

Step 2: is the response from a form-post. it will be dynamic. (read: non-cacheable)

Step 3 is a little more interesting. Jinitiator will want to download some JAR files. my experience is that there are multi-megabyte in size.

these are cacheable - and in terms of a typical enterprise-deployment, are the things which consume a significant amount of WAN bandwidth.

Deploying caching in a branch office is a huge win here -- you can either pre-populate the cache with these JAR files, or simply have the 'first' user to use them take the performance hit of a cache-miss (and transferring them over the WAN), and subsequent requests will be served locally.

For Steps 4 & 5, these will be requests for dynamic content (from the database). These won't be cacheable.

Thus, as far as caching is concerned, there is still some benefit.

Other Content Networking technologies may also be useful:

- Content Routing:

for redundant-site/disaster-recovery content routing

- Content Switching:

for load-balancing incoming requests among multiple servers (or load-balancing SQL*Net requests if that is another access method).

Hope this answers your question.

cheers,

lincoln.