Do You Need to Bounce E-Business Suite Application Servers Regularly?

A customer recently reported an issue where they needed to bounce their E-Business Suite application tier (mid-tier) servers once a week to resolve stability issues. This shouldn't be necessary. We recommend against bouncing EBS application servers regularly. We've done a lot of work with the E-Business Suite to ensure that regular bounces are not required with the latest releases.



Bouncing your system can reduce performance

It seems counter-intuitive, but bouncing your EBS application tier servers can actually reduce your system's performance rather than improve it. Oracle E-Business Suite is explicitly designed to minimize round trips between the application tier and the database. We make extensive use of caches:

JDBC cache buffers

Java object cache

MSD cache for OA Framework pages

... and others

Every time you bounce your mid-tier, you clear these caches. The longer your mid-tier remains up and running, the better-populated these caches will be, and the better your overall system performance.

Treat the symptoms but miss the real problem

If you need to bounce your EBS application tier server regularly, there's a deeper problem with your environment.

Here are some issues that can be deceptively-masked by bouncing your EBS mid-tier:

Improperly-tuned heap space (e.g. insufficient heap space, insufficient space for perm generation)

Memory leaks (usually the result of poorly-designed customizations)

Memory hemorrhage (usually the result of infinite loops or poorly-designed custom queries)

Heap space fragmentation (usually the result of running older Java releases)

JDBC connection leaks (resolved in 11.5.10.2 and all R12 releases)

If you're experiencing problems that seem to go away when you bounce your mid-tier, that's a red flag. You should log a formal Service Request with Oracle Support so that we can help you identify the root cause.

References

Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Technology: Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Best Practices (PPT, 6 MB, OpenWorld 2010)

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