Inspired by the work of Stoyan on his performance advent calendar I decided to start an application performance almanac. According to wikipedia an almanac is -”… an annual publication containing information in a particular field”.

Throughout the year I will write regular posts on a specific topic in the area of performance management. I have chosen this domain because this blog is about performance and because I think it is worth spending time on this topic. Additionally I am currently writinig a book (in German) on Enterprise Java Performance. So snippets from the book will be published here and discussions from the posts will be reflected in the book

The posts will cover topics which come to my mind. Rather than covering specific technologies and frameworks I will cover more conceptual areas of performance management. Although the posts might be somehow a bit theoretical, the topics of the posts will cover areas of the daily life of those working in this area.

I will select topics which I currently consider interesting. However I appreciate feedback and input from you – the readers – on what you are interested in. If you have got great content in the area, I am also happy linking to your content as well.  Here you will also find proposals for upcoming articles.  Here are the first two articles:

Week 1 – The Proactivity of Troubleshooting

This post takes a deeper look into the nature of troubleshooting  of performance problems. While this activity is very often – if not almost always – viewed as a reactive activity. However if it is done right, I involves a lof of proactive work.

Week 2 – The Many Faces of End-User Monitoring

End- user experience – as I think we all agree – is the performance perceived by the actual user at a specific point in time. Sounds simple, but is in reality not that easy to ascertain. There a number of different approaches which all have their specific advantages and drawbacks. This post gives an overview of different ways to monitor end-user experience.

Week 3 – The Myth and Truth of Performance Measurement Overhead

In this third article of my Performance Almanac I discuss the role of overhead in performance management. As a performance management solution provider we’re frequently asked “How much overhead does your solution have?” This question is however a bit more complex to answer than just giving a single number.

Week 4 – Top 10 Reports are not the final answer

This post discussed the usefulness of top ten reports in performance engineering. I shows cases where they provide value and alternative where top ten reports are not the best choice

Week 5 – Hunting Lost Treasures – Understanding and Finding Memory Leaks

Searching for memory leaks can easily become an adventure – fighting through a jungle of objects and references. When the leak occurs in production time is short and you have to act fast. Like in a treasure hunt, we have to interpret signs, unravel mysteries to finally find the “lost” memory This post focuses on how to analyze memory problems by covering and provide some insights into the anatomy of memory leaks..

Week 6 – How to make Developers Write Performance Tests

This post discusses the seven main reasons how to make developers write performance tests. If you think it is hard to make developers write tests, learn some tips and tricks on how to make them more tests on their own.

Week 7 – Applying Maslow’s Model to Application Performance

This post takes an unconventional approach towards performance management. It takes the Maslow hierarchy of needs as a basis for defining how to implement performance management following a phased approach.

Week 8 – Challenges in Tracing JavaScript Performance by Example

This post discusses several problems in tracing end-user performance in modern JavaScript/AJAX application. Modern commonly used technologies make measuring performance highly challenging. First a simple web page is built which utilizes several AJAX techniques. Then the used techniques are examied regarding how they make performance measurement complex.

Week 9 – How to Measures Application Response Times

Measurement is the most central concept in any performance-related activity. If you are not measuring you are blind. As important as measuring per se is collecting the right measurements. Which metrics are the right ones depends on what you want to do. However there are some general principles which – when followed – can make your life much easier. Read how to work with response times and make performance analysis easier.

Week 14 – Building Your Own Amazon CloudWatch Monitor in 5 Steps

Amazon EC2 offers the CloudWatch service to monitor cloud instances as well as load balancers. It offers useful infrastructure metrics about the performance of your EC2 infrastructure. This post provides step-by-step guidance on how to implement an Amazon CloudWatch monitor.

Week 15 – Optimizing Data Intensive Web Pages by Example

This post discusses how to optimize data intensive web pages showing several thousand records of data. It uses the Show URLs page of Show Slow as an example.Step-by-step the page is optimized using  several optimization techniques. The result is a massive reduction all key performance metrics like download time, page load time and rendering time.

Week 16 – How is to blame for bad application performance?

When something goes wrong who’s to blame? In this post I take a closer look at who is responsible when applications have performance problems. Maybe there is a general rule on who is responsible for performance problems.

Week 22 – Is There a Business Case for Application Performance?

Negative performance affects our business. At the same time recent studies show that management does not see the need for investing into better performance. So obviously performance does not really matter to business.  The question is who is to blame – business because they do not see the need for investments or the technical stuff for not getting the point across?

Week 23 – 7 Steps to Improve your Application Performance Practices

Performance Engineering should be part of every company’s software processes. However, failing to follow some important rules will lead to frustration, waste of resources and finally failure. A set of 7 rules will help you to be successful and solve the major problems people face in performance engineering.

Related posts:

1. Week 23 – 7 Rules to Improve your Application Performance Practices In this post I discuss the seven most important steps...
2. Week 22 – Is There a Business Case for Application Performance? We all know that slow performance – and service disruption...
3. Week 7 – Applying Maslow’s Pyramid to Application Performance This time I take an a bit unconventional approach towards...
4. Week 16 – Who is to blame for bad application performance? When something goes wrong who’s to blame? In this post...
5. Inability to measure SLAs around application performance The 2008 Aberdeen Report on Application Performance Management listed the...