Optimizing Birt Viewer for solaris in simple steps

I was working on BIRT in windows. The performance in windows was awesome but when I moved the code to our solaris server a report that would take round about 10 seconds on windows took over a minute!

Here is how I improved the performance: (Note that I prefer jetty to tomcat due to its lightweight nature ..... Actually I use hightide ... but that's another story)

• Make the default memory allocation greater:
  

open your tide.sh in the bin directory (hightide.sh in my case). Find and modify the following:

# JAVA_OPTIONS
# Extra options to pass to the JVM

TO:

JAVA_OPTIONS="-server -Xmx3800 -Xms3800"

this basically tells the JVM to run in server mode i.e. -server (slower startup time.... faster execution time :)) and to start of with a default of 4GB ram with a max of 4GB ram (Xmx and Xms) . Change this to how much RAM you want allocated to JVM by default

• Update your BIRT runtime to the latest and greatest version

I am telling you.... don't take this as a joke! :)

• Update your JDK to the latest version

Again ... no kidding. Solaris 10 comes with JDK 5 by default. JDK 6 is so much better. Just download the .sh file for jdk from the sun website and install it. It is a simple command line script. You do not even need root privledges to run it. All you need is access to a folder you can write to (your home dir ?) and thats it.

After installation it note the location of your installation dir
e.g. /home/bla/Desktop/1.6.13_10
or whatever.

again modify jetty.sh (or hightide.sh) changing:

# JAVA_HOME
# Home of Java installation.

to :

JAVA_HOME="/home/bla/Desktop/1.6.13_10"

Thats all. Now give BIRT a spin. My runtime went from 10 secs to 7 secs :)!!