Application Performance, Scalability and Architecture

We often see request error rates as an indicator for SLA compliance. Reality however shows that this draws a wrong picture. Let’s start with an example. We had a meeting with a customer and were talking about their SLA and what it is based on. Like in many other cases the request error rate was [...]

There is no doubt that performance is important for your business. If you don’t agree you should check out what we and others think about the Performance Impact on Business or remember headlines like these: Target.com web site was down after promoting a new labels: Article on MSN Twitter was down and people complaining about [...]

We like to blog about real life scenarios to demonstrate practical examples on how to manage application performance. In this blog I will tell you how we internally improved page load time for some of our community users by 3.5 seconds by simply following our own web performance guidelines that we promote through our blog, [...]

I was looking at Cassandra, one of the major NoSQL solutions, and I was immediately impressed with its write speed even on my notebook. But I also noticed that it was very volatile in its response time, so I took a deeper look at it. First Cassandra Write Test I did the first write tests [...]

Often performance management is still confused with performance troubleshooting. Others think that performance management in production is simply about system and JVM level monitoring and that they are already doing APM. The first perception assumes that APM is about speeding up some arbitrary method performance and the second assumes that performance management is just about [...]

The public cloud promised fast deployments and near endless scalability at low costs. Whether that promise was too good to be true is yet to be seen. But recent problems at Amazon have shown one thing clearly enough: neither Cloud Applications nor the ways we monitor them are production ready yet. On September 15 at [...]

In my role I am responsible for our Community and our Community Portal. In order for our Community Portal to be accepted by our users I need to ensure that our users find the content they are interested in. In a recent upgrade we added lots of new multi-media content that will make it easier [...]

Many times have we been posting the recommendation to speed up your DOM Element lookups by using unique IDs or at least a tag name. So, instead of using $(“.wishlist”) you should use $(“div.wishlist”) which will speed up lookups in older browsers. If you want to lookup a single element then give it a unique [...]

The US Open is one of the major world sport events these days. Those tennis enthusiasts that can’t make it to the Centre Court in Flushing Meadows are either watching the games on television or following the scores on the official US Open Web Site. The question is: How long does it take to get [...]

Testing mobile web sites on the actual device is still a challenge. While tools like dynaTrace Ajax Edition make it very easy to get detailed performance data from desktop browsers, we do not have the same luxury for mobile. I was wondering whether desktop tooling can be used for analyzing and optimizing mobile sites. My idea was [...]