Liferay

Late last year, we started the process of upgrading our performance testing environments.  Our previous performance environment were basically desktops with limited CPU and memory.  The latest performance environment resembles what we see many of our clients use.  Our configuration is as follows:

1) Web Server: 1 CPU quad core 2.4 Ghz Intel Xeon 2GB memory

2) Application server: Dual cpu Intel Xeon quad core 2.4 Ghz 8GB memory

3) Database server: Dual CPU Intel Xeon quad core 2.4Ghz 4GB memory and 250GB SCSI 15k RPM hard drive.

We utilize sanitized data from our production Liferay.com to generate our test scenarios.  This dedicated environment allows us to provide realistic benchmarks for Liferay Portal and use this environment to find bottlenecks and improve performance. 

As part of our ongoing performance tuning, we are working with Sun to create SLAMD test scenarios for the out of box features the portal, including CMS, blogs, wikis, forums, etc.  We already use Hudson to perform automated builds for us.  Once SLAMD scenarios are in place, we will integrate these tests into the Liferay portal build process and detect performance variances.  Alejandro Medrano from Sun has been working with us to get SLAMD scenarios in place as quickly as possible.

At the end of initial performance study, we will be able to provide benchmarks and guidance for a series of reference deployment architectures, from small single servers deployments to large HA deployments.