From time to time I need some kind of mechanism to continuously refresh a web page in order to provide a real-time dashboard of some kind. It would be great if I only could refresh a part of a specific page, for example: the traffic lights on a dashboard that indicate the status of the system.

It is really easy to only refresh a part of the page by using the JQuery JavaScript library. Once we’ve included the JQuery library into our page, we only need 1 line of JavaScript to get it working:

<script src="/js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

So we just place this little JS code snippet into our page to refresh everything inside the tag with the content id, let’s say every 5 seconds:

setInterval(function() {
    $("#content").load(location.href+" #content>*","");
}, 5000);

That’s it!! It is thus fairly easy to accomplish some real-time monitoring behavior with just that line of code. No more weird meta-refresh tags or iframe kind of workarounds in your web applications.

Every 5 seconds, we will refresh the content of the element with the content of the same URL and all elements that reside under the element with id: content.

Quite nice, don’t you think? JQuery certainly allows you to apply some very powerful techniques in just a few lines of code. I like it.. a lot!

It would be too hard explaining all configuration details about tuning the performance on a WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) as these rely heavily on the chosen infrastructure. I will however provide a nice troubleshooting guide that allows you to track down the performance bottlenecks on your WebSphere Portal environment.

IBM WebSphere Portal software provides an enterprise SOA based solution to build core portal services that aggregate applications and content as role-based applications.

When starting with performance tuning, it is important to begin with a baseline, monitor the performance metrics to determine if any parameters should be changed and monitor the performance metrics again to determine the effectiveness of the change.

In short, you need to measure, measure… and then just measure once again.

What do you need to do in order to start performance tuning on WebSphere Portal? more…