Production Monitoring is about ensuring the stability and health of our system, that also includes the application. A lot of times we encounter production systems that concentrate on System Monitoring, under the assumption that a stable system leads to stable and healthy applications. So let’s see what System Monitoring can tell us about our Application. [...]
In my last post I explained what a major Garbage Collection is. While a major Collection certainly has a negative impact on performance it is not the only thing that we need to watch out for. And in case of the CMS we might not always be able to distinguish between major and minor GC. [...]
In a recent post we have shown how the Java Garbage Collection MXBean Counters have changed for the Concurrent Mark-and-Sweep Collector. It now reports all GC runs instead of just major collections. That prompted me to think about what a major GC actually is or what it should be. It is actually quite hard to find [...]
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 [...]
Agile Development Practices have widely been adopted in R&D Organizations. A core component is Continuous Integration where code changes are continuously integrated and tested to achieve the goal of having “potential shippable code” at the end of every Sprint/Iteration. In order to verify code changes agile team members write Unit or Functional Tests that get [...]
I recently got engaged with a client who ran an increasing load test against their load-balanced application. I got engaged because they had a phenomenon they couldn’t explain – here is an excerpt of the email: We have a jBoss application with mySQL that runs stable in a load testing environment with let’s say 20 [...]
We are using Confluence for both our internal Wiki as well as for our external Community Portal. I just came across a very nasty performance bug in the version we are running on our external system. We run 3.2 and the User Search Feature keeps me waiting several minutes each time I search for users. [...]
Watch the 7 Minute Walk-Through Video that guides you through the Integration described in this blog post. Load Testing has traditionally been done In-House with load-testing tools using machines in your test center to generate HTTP traffic against the application needing to be tested for high volume transactions. With agile development practices, shorter release cycles and [...]
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 [...]
Whether you call it Football, Futbol, Fussball, Futebol, Calcio or Soccer – if you are a fan of this game I am sure you are looking forward to the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The tournaments web site is http://www.fifa.com/worldcup and allows the fans to follow their teams and get the latest updates [...]
