TUI UK Ltd, is part of TUI AG, the largest tourism and services group in the world with over 80 tour operators active in 18 European countries. In the UK they are most well known for their Thomson and ThomsonFly brands. Chris Maycock is the Applications Services Web Coordinator responsible for supporting TUI UK websites. His job is to ensure that the websites deliver exceptional levels of availability and performance.

This is a tough job when you consider the challenges of managing a complex multi-tier application environment that needs to be continually updated in order to respond to market demands. In summer 2006 TUI UK launched a new application to allow customers to “Build Your Own Holiday” in real time. This requires the ability to pull together air fares, car hire rates, hotel costs and other travel information dynamically. Poor performance would immediately make the application unusable and mean that TUI would be losing money.

Infrastructure

The TUI UK Web Services run on a mixture of Solaris and Linux operating systems, using iPlanet & Apache Web servers, and WebLogic & Tomcat at the application layer. The backend database runs on Oracle. These Web Services also have connectivity to other TUI UK and external systems. The new application comprises two J2EE layers running across multiple Tomcat servers. The front-end Internet Booking Engine uses JSP struts and XSL. The back-end XML Middleware engine uses servlets with SOAP/HTTP interfaces.

Price of success

Soon after the launch of this new application, its success meant that rapidly increasing customer usage began to cause intermittent performance problems. At this point TUI brought in Application Performance Ltd (AP) to investigate the problem.

AP get quick wins

TUI already had a long relationship with AP, and was already a user of the i3 software, so called upon the experience of AP to help investigate these issues. After a quick install AP used Symantec i3 to gather performance data for the end-to-end application environment including web, application and database tiers. The ability to capture history in context all the time for all tiers enabled AP to understand what was happening before, during and after the performance problems caused by large numbers of users. Within a very short time it was concluded that the first application failures were caused by a java.lang. OutOfMemory condition. Further analysis showed that this was not a Heap space issue that is more commonly found, so the recommendation was to increase the Permanent Generation Space by using the MaxPermSize parameter.

This greatly improved the situation but did not eliminate the problems completely. AP therefore continued to investigate the very detailed data gathered by Symantec i3 and found that Heap usage was random with occasional sharp spikes. Using the history within i3 it was possible to determine that a specific Java method making a JDBC call to Oracle was executed just prior to the spikes in heap usage. Symantec i3 was then able to track the activity all the way through to the database to determine that the SQL statement was selecting 386MB of data from an entire table when a wildcard search was executed by a user. Having discovered this key information, a recommendation was made to alter the search logic validation, which when implemented, prevented this from happening again.

The conclusion

TUI has now been running the “Build Your Own Holiday” application without any outages for more than 6 months and plans to deploy Symantec i3 on more applications in the future.

“AP is a key differentiator in helping TUI UK to achieve our objectives with the i3 product suite. We have seen the value of their product knowledge and technical expertise as an implementation partner at each step. AP helped us to quickly realise the full benefits of i3, from installation to identifying the multiple problems we had and helping us tune the performance of our new business critical application. The responsiveness and dedication shown by AP has helped us to meet our challenges and saved us thousands of pounds.” Chris Maycock – TUI UK

Symantec i3 – benefits seen

• End-to-end coverage across Web, Application and Database layers.
• Ability to drill down from the application tier into the database without losing context.
• Ability to rapidly get to the root cause and identify performance tuning recommendations.
• Ability to relate application performance with end-user service levels, in real time.
• Straight forward to install and easy to use.

“TUI UK IT Service Delivery has delivered improved service availability for our customers and revenue growth as a direct result of resolution of performance issues identified by i3.”