How to Performance Tune OracleAS Portal?

Setting the Number of PPE Fetchers
A request for a portal page originates in the form of a URL sent from a user's browser to the HTTP server. If the request is for a portal page, it is forwarded to the Parallel Page Engine (PPE). The PPE then asks each Web provider that owns a portlet on the page to execute the portlet and return content to the portal page.

There are two options available to enable you to increase the concurrency of the PPE:

Option 1: Create a New OC4J Instance to Create Another Set of PPE Threads
Access the Application Server Control Console.
Typically the Application Server Control Console is located at http://hostname:1810

1. Click the link for the application server middle tier where OracleAS Portal is
installed.
2. Click the OC4J_Portal link.
3. Click the Administration link.
4. Click the Server Properties link
5. Under the Multiple VM Configuration section, change the Number of Processes for the default_island to 2.
6. Click Apply.
7. Navigate back to the OC4J_Portal home page.
8. Click Restart, to restart the OC4J_Portal instance.

Alternatively, you can edit the file opmn.xml manually, though the use of Application
Server Control Console is the recommended approach.The parameter to create multiple Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE instances is called numProcs and is configured in the file ORACLE_HOME/opmn/conf/opmn.xml.

Option 2: Increase the Value of Default Number of Threads
The parameter to tune the number of PPE threads is called poolSize and is configured in
the file 
ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_Portal/applications/portal/portal/WEB-INF/web.xml

The default setting is 25. If pool size is too low, the user notices that pages take too long to
draw at peak periods. If pool size is set too high, a possible resource drain may occur
because too many concurrent URL requests can overwhelm the PPE.