You will probably see the biggest increase from the Base portal tuning recommendations.
Give it as much memory as you can spare and increase the thread pool size -- you should see performance increase just from this. (If on Windows, you can't go above 1.5G, but for a server Windows should always be your last choice.)
After the base portal tuning, try again, then start to do some performance monitoring.
If you're a big WCM user, check the caches here and make them bigger.
Links:
- a starting point is IBM doc#swg27007059,
IBM WebSphere Portal Performance Troubleshooting Guide,
it contains basic generic troubleshooting methodology. You may want a methodology like this for your manager or client.. Also a step-by-step guide to the PMI / Tivoli Performance Viewer -- these are definitely worth checking to get basic measurements of your server.
- WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management 6.1.x Performance Tuning Guide
Broken out into portal, WCM, database, web, etc components. Has specific parameters to change, but you need to know what you're doing.
This document is also somewhere on the IBM side, but the lotus wiki versions allow for updates.
(I have even corrected some of their documents.. if only they would conform to the formatting conventions) - This looks good, but I only found it later, after I did my tuning..:
WebSphere tuning for the impatient: How to get 80% of the performance improvement with 20% of the effort
...
Also testing Zemanta with this post.. the included image is totally unrelated.
Actually, I said 'pool' -- I think that's where it came from, and you have to admit it looks cooler than a 'websphere'.