Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Oracle Application Express. Fast. Like a Veyron Super Sport.



A partner from the United Kingdom recently asked me for some statistics about apex.oracle.com, as I had authored something similar in a blog post back in 2009.  This gentleman was proposing a magazine article and sought some updated statistics.  Since I compiled this information for him, I reasoned it was worthwhile to also share this same information with the APEX community.

In the past 7 days on apex.oracle.com:
Total Page Views:              4,875,173
Distinct Applications Used:        5,842
Distinct Users:                    9,048
Total Number of Workspaces:       20,974
Total Number of Applications:     77,478
New Workspaces Approved:             904

As most people know, apex.oracle.com is the customer evaluation instance, for anyone on the Internet to come and "kick the tires" of Oracle Application Express.

However, what I find even more interesting is the internal instance of Oracle Application Express (apex.oraclecorp.com), hosted inside of Oracle for anyone in the company to come along and build applications, requiring nothing but a browser.  It is run and managed by professionals in Product Development IT.  It's used by virtually every line of business in the company (e.g., HR, Product Development, QA, Sales, Marketing, Real Estate & Facilities, Manufacturing & Distribution, just to name a few).  Instead of merely kicking the tires, these are real applications that the business depends upon, even if some of them are opportunistic applications:

In the past 7 days on apex.oraclecorp.com:
Total Page Views:              2,389,593
Distinct Applications Used:        2,023
Distinct Users:                   18,203
Total Number of Workspaces:        2,759
Total Number of Applications:     14,592

And lastly, we have an internal application which is really nothing more than a sophisticated mini data warehouse serving as an employee directory.  Most Oracle employees know it by the name of Aria People.  Tom and others had written this application in lovingly hand-crafted PL/SQL before I even joined Oracle, and we eventually rewrote it in APEX.  As you can imagine, it's used by virtually every employee in the company.  We average 1.4M - 1.5M page views per day.  In reviewing the last 100 days of activity, there was one day (18-MAR-2014) where this application did 3,132,573 page views from 45,767 distinct IP addresses.  The median page rendering time was 0.03 seconds.  In this same application, again looking back across the last 100 days, the busiest hour we had was on 11-MAR-2014, with 171,156 page views in a single hour, from 6,254 distinct IP addresses.  That averages out to 47.543 page views per second.

Oracle Application Express is as scalable as the Oracle Database.  And with some mad Oracle skills, you can scale to great heights.

3 comments:

Morten Braten said...

Thanks for the update, this is always interesting information.

Could you say a couple of words about the hardware these sites are running on, in terms of CPU, memory, disk, etc. ? (I believe the apex.oracle.com site has been moved to a new infrastructure since your previous posts?)

- Morten

Juergen Schuster said...

Great, very useful information for our eternal performance discussion!

Joel R. Kallman said...

HI Morten,

I should have included this information, so thanks for suggesting it.

The primary database server for apex.oracle.com is on two compute nodes of an Oracle Exadata X2 server (12 cores / 96 GB RAM) with 4 storage cells, 144 TB raw capacity. The two mid-tiers are VM's (6 CPU/80 GB RAM) on a full rack Exalogic server.

It's definitely a lot of hardware for this relatively small problem, but it's the "standard" PDIT configuration. I typically find these servers (both mid-tier and database tier) over 90% idle. Even during my writing of this comment, I did a quick spot-check of the two nodes of the apex.oracle.com database server, and both hovered between 95% and 96% idle.

Joel