Keith A. Marshall, Lead Developer at Insight North America, talks about how he identifies certain transactions by injecting specific HTTP Headers “on-the-fly” using Fiddler. Performance and Scalability testing are two important components in our software development and applications deployment lifecycle. The more information that is correlated from the testing the better the picture we get. [...]

// 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 [...]

Just in time for the upcoming Webinar with The BonTon Stores, were we talk about the challenges in operating complex WebSphere environments, we had another set of prospects running their applications on WebSphere. Francis Cordon, a colleague of mine, shares some of the screenshots resulting from these engagements. In this blog I want to highlight [...]

// 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Testing and Optimizing of what I call “traditional” page-based web applications is not too hard to do. Take CNN as an example. You have the home page www.cnn.com. From there you can click through the news sections such as U.S, World, Politics, … – each click loading a new page with a unique URL. Testing [...]