Obviously, cloud computing is not just a fancy trend anymore. Quite a few SaaS offerings are already built on platforms like Windows Azure. Others use Amazon’s EC2 to host their complete infrastructure or at least use it for additional resources to handle peak load or do “number-crunching”. Many also end up with a hybrid approach [...]

Some time back I planned to publish a series about java memory problems. It took me longer than originally planned, but here is the second installment. In the first part I talked about the different causes for memory leaks, but memory leaks are by far not the only issue around java memory management. Edit: A [...]

Like everybody else it took me a while to wrap my head around the BigTable concepts in Cassandra. The brain needs some time to accept that a column in Cassandra is really not the same as a column in our beloved RDBMS. After that I wrote the first Web Application and run into a pretty [...]

I have been working with performance sensitive applications for a long time now. As can be expected most of them have to use the database at one point or the other. So you inevitably end up having a connection pool. Now to make sure that your application is not suffering from waiting on connections you [...]

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 [...]

This post is contributed by Asad Ali – Enablement Services Consultant at dynaTrace. Based on his experience with numerous customers he describes how to optimize the data access layer of applications by “violating” a paradigm that is often referred to as a golden rule for designing applications. Before the advent of the 3-tier architecture, client [...]

// Next Wednesday, May 25th at Noon ET / 9AM PT I am happy to host another Best Practice Webinar with one of our customers. Dan Gerard, Divisional Vice President of Technical and Web Services at The Bon Ton Stores and I will talk about the challenges of optimizing performance in their WebSphere Commerce production [...]

Christopher André is an Enablement Service Consultant at dynaTrace and helps our Customers to maximize their value they get out of dynaTrace. The other day, I went to a customer who was experiencing a problem that happens quite frequently: he had a cache that was constantly growing, leading to OutOfMemory Exceptions. Other problems in the [...]

Most articles about Garbage Collection ignore the fact that the Sun Hotspot JVM is not the only game in town. In fact whenever you have to work with either IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic you will run on a different runtime. While the concept of Garbage Collection is the same, the implementation is not and [...]

Lucy Monahan is a Principal Performance QA Engineer at Novell, and helps to manage their distributed Agile process. One of the most important features of an application is to provide adequate security and protect secrets held within. Business Transactions used with Continuous Integration, Unit-, Feature- and Negative Testing specialized for security can detect known security [...]