WebSphere V3.5 Handbook

16.8. Closing thoughts on topologies

Whatever topology you decide on, a best practice is to partition your production acceptance environment exactly the same as your production environment. This avoids surprises when deploying your application into production.

Another consideration, when practical for your application architecture, is to create a number of smaller application servers, rather than a single large one.

This has at least two advantages:

- The plug-in config files can be smaller (less complexity of URIs), which leads to better startup performance and possibly better execution performance.

- At least during the development phase, it takes less time to cycle a smaller application server to pickup various configuration changes.

Of course, ...