To be able to run on a number of different machines, JBoss has very low memory settings by default. You will usually run JBoss in production on a Big Box (TM), so you can tweak the settings to take advantage of your memory :
increase the VM maxsize. This can be done in the command line options of the java command in run.bat / run.sh, see the documentation of your JVM for more details
increase the cache size for your beans. The more beans in your cache, the less swapping and calls to the DB. For details on how to configure the cache for your beans, see the section called “Advanced cache configuration”.
Logging can be very slow, and by default JBoss is quite verbose. To change the logging policy for JBoss, see the logging entries in jboss.jcml. You may also want to use file logging instead of console logging.
Tuned updates for CMP entity beans are turned off by default. Using them can dramatically increase the performance of DB synchronizations. For details on tuned updates, see the section called “JAWS Options”.