Application Performance, Scalability and Architecture

// Last time I explained logical and organizational prerequisites to a successful production level application performance monitoring. I originally wanted to look at the concrete metrics we need on every tier, but was asked how you can correlate data in a distributed environment, so this will be the first thing that we look into. So [...]

// When we get engaged with prospects that are interested in our performance management solution we walk them through a Proof of Concept. We let them install dynaTrace on their own prior to the actual POC. During the POC we ask them to exercise typical use cases on their application that show performance problems. We [...]

It has been 5 years ago that Amazon launched its EC2 Cloud. Since then it has been growing and learning constantly. Those in the know have waited and dreaded the coming 21st of April 2011.  Yesterday at 1AM PDT the Amazon Elastic Cloud gained self-awareness. It immediately tried to take over the US-EAST region. According [...]

Memory and Garbage Collection problems are still the most prominent issues in any java application. One of the reasons is that the very nature of Garbage Collection is often misunderstood. This prompted me to write a summary of some of the most frequent and also most obscure memory related issues that I have encountered in [...]

Every change in your code can potentially introduce a performance regression and can impact the application’s ability to scale. Regression analysis addresses this problem by tracking performance aspects of different components throughout the development process and under different load patterns. Black vs. White Box Analysis There are different flavors of regression analysis. We can either [...]

Setting up Application Performance Monitoring is a big task, but like everything else it can be broken down into simple steps. You have to know what you want to achieve and subsequently where to start. So let’s start at the beginning and take a top-down approach Know what you want The first thing to do [...]

Recently there was a bigger discussion at dynaTrace around the cost of exceptions. When working with customers we very often find a lot of exceptions they are not aware of. After removing these exceptions, the code runs significantly faster than before. This creates the assumption that using exceptions in your code comes with a significant [...]

I am currently working on a blog where I am going to explain how to do cross-browser testing and performance analysis using dynaTrace. Before I am going to blog that How-To I want to share with you one thing that I have noticed when executing my tests in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6. Test [...]

Golfers follow the Masters 2011 – but – if you try to access masters.com right now you will get annoying popup messages from your browser telling you that you better stop JavaScript from executing because it takes too long. On my browser this looks like this: This happens on every page. So – why does [...]

Memory Leaks are painful – especially when they crash your production servers. But – how does one go about analyzing the leak that only happens in the production environment? Here is a story I was told while on-site with one of our clients. I asked: “Chris, tell me about a recent performance problem and how [...]