Load balancing using JCo

[Former Member]

Hi,

I am trying to evaluate the use of JCo in an extremely high volume (about 7000 calls per minute from a webserver to SAP) environment.

I undertand that within a connection pool, JCo will handle connections very well. Obviously, in my case, I need multiple pools. I could see a Poolmanager functionality that will help create multiple pools. But, when one pool is exhausted and I have to switch to another, do I have to write some application logic? or is there a standard way of doing it?

Also, is JCo the best way to interface a 7000 transaction per minute web application to SAP? Has it been proven not to melt at this volumes?

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

cheers

Vijay

[Benny]

Hi Vijay,

The pool is automatic inside a JCA Connection, however, this may not be your problem.

Running 7000 transactions/minute probably kills even a direct connection. I guess you have to do this over a cluster anyway.

In that case you may already be at the point using a hardware load balancer, connectuing to several machines and then using  a JCA adapter (which includes JCO). The adapter then will take care for the connections.

Regards,

Benny

[Former Member]

JCA adapter -- which includes JCO?  

Could you explain this a bit more?  I'm looking for a reliable JCA adaptor for SAP R/3. Are you saying that SAP has a JCA adapter that uses JCO internally?

Thanks,

M.L.

[Benny]

Well, once you go a little bit deeper with  JCA, you will find out that it does not do anything functional for you by default. JCA is a standard that just makes your life easier in terms of Connection and transaction handling (and one or two more issues).

But all it says about the connecting systesm is that it will be there but it does not tell you how to interact with it - In other words, the JCA adapter can connect you to a database, an ERP system or whatever system you think about. That means there is no functionality in there.

And because of that you need some way to handle this. And this is  JCO functionality whether you use JCO directly or the JCA adapter. The JCA adapter just helps you to make up connections in a standard way.

You can find details in the documentation here: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_webas630/helpdata/en/6f/1bd5caa85b11d6b28500508b5d5211/frameset.htm

BTW: If you distrust JCO itself for some reason I recommend the new implementation in Web Application Server 6.40, as this one is far better for technical reasons.

Regards,

Benny

[Former Member]

Hello Mike,

SAP supplies a compliant JCA adaptor called R/3 (SAP) connector which is based on the Connector Framework (which extends JCA).

This JCA connector internally uses JCO but does not expose it in SP2. You will use only standard Connector Framework interfaces (which are available also to other backend systems such as JDBC connector for databases, connector for peoplesoft,BW and more). You will get for free the connection pooling which is supported in the application server by using a JCA compliant connector.

Best Regards,

Ran