Best Practices for Using VimPortType with JAX-WS

The JAX-WS package can leak memory due to repeated creation of VimPort connections with the vSphere Web Services SDK. The use of a static VimPort object can alleviate the memory leaks, but can lead to other problems, especially with thread safety. JAX-WS does not provide a thread-safe Port implementation for the VimPort object, which accesses the Web Services API.

Use one or more of the following best practices, depending on the nature of your plug-in:

• For a single-threaded plug-in that does synchronous requests to the vSphere Web Services API, create a static instance of the VimPort object and reuse it for subsequent requests.
• For a plug-in that does not need to handle a large number of asynchronous requests, create a static instance of the VimPort object and serialize access to it.
• For higher performance with a large number of asynchronous requests, create a pool of VimPort objects.
• Use static initializer code to issue a dummy call to the getPort() method before your plug-in needs to handle actual requests. The first call to getPort() runs slowly because it must load a large amount of WSDL code for the Web Services API.