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 [...]
Our new book Java Enterprise Performance is now available. It covers all major topics around performance management for enterprise Java applications. The book targets software and system architects as well as developers. It starts with an introduction to performance measurement techniques and data interpretation. The following technical chapters cover all major technologies used in enterprise [...]
When building distributed applications one of the central performance-critical components is serialization. Most modern frameworks make it very easy to send data over the wire. In many cases you don’t see at all what is going on behind the scenes. Choosing the right serialization strategy however is central for achieving good performance and scalability. Serialization [...]
2010 is over and there has been a log going on in the application performance space. We started this project at the beginning of the year inspired by Stoyan Stefanov’s performance advent calendar of 2009. (There is also one for 2010). Now twelve months later we have our 2010 performance almanac available. According to Wikipedia an almanac [...]
In this post of our WPO Use Case series I discuss another very important use case. Load Time Optimization is most likely the most vital use case from an end user perspective. At the same time it is also highly important from a business perspective as studies by ShopZilla or Google and Bing show that [...]
In the first and second post of this series I discussed benchmarking and different approaches towards optimization of web application. As already mentioned in the last post, as soon as you get used to working with Key Performance Indicators you will want to automatically monitor them. ShowSlow is a great example of how you can [...]
In the last post I discussed benchmarking as the first use case for Web Performance Optimization (WPO). This time I will take a closer look at optimization. After we have discovered how our site behaves compared to our competition – or any reference we might want to benchmark against – we want to learn how [...]
Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the usefulness of current web performance metrics. We all got used to First Impression, onLoad and Fully Loaded time. With dynaTrace Ajax Edition we also provide all this metrics. Joshua Bixby wrote a very good post an why they do not really tell us what we [...]
Web Performance Optimization (WPO) constitutes of a set of activities targeted at improving the performance of web applications. First coined by Steve Souders WPO is developing into a growing industry. Every month new companies and projects offering web performance services emerge. WPO is much more than performance analysis; however, performance analysis is a central part [...]
The use of transactions is a cornerstone when building database applications. However in our daily work, we often do not really care much about them. In many cases they are handled implicitly for us by the (J EE) container or application framework – such as Spring – we are using. We rely on these frameworks [...]
