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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

After spending a lot of time focusing on Client-Side Web 2.0 Performance Problems it is time to focus on specific Server-Side Performance Problems. Last week I worked with a client that runs a custom application on Microsoft CRM 4.0 and experienced performance problems in their test environment. Individual web requests to query or update data [...]

An Oracle database provides several v$ views to query information about the database instance, including statistical information that can be used for monitoring and problem analysis purposes. Rene Nyffenegger wrote a nice Summary on Oracle’s v$ views that gives an overview of all available views. The following illustration shows a dashboard with key metrics that [...]

Every time I work with one of our .NET customers to help them with managing their application performance I come across the same problems as seen with other clients before: lots of ADO.NET queries, many hidden exceptions in core or 3rd party .NET libraries, slow 3rd party components, inefficient custom code, … Too often we [...]

I recently gave a talks on the behaviour of different JPA frameworks at W-JAX(Germany) and TheServerSide Java Symposium (Prague). As some people have asked me, I am publishing the samples as well. I would also give away the eclipse project, however with all the third party libraries I am sure I will end up not [...]

Last year at devoxx I gave a talk on common pitfalls in performance management. Parleys has now put the talk online. A couple of people have been asking to get slides. Now you can even get the voice and the slides. In this presentation I give an overview of typical performance antipatterns. I discuss conceptual, [...]

Many of you bloggers out there have already covered the fact that Stored Procedures should be used for INSERTS, UPDATES and DELETES or in general when modifying multiple rows in a batch like statement. I also came across other blogs that discussed deleting or updated multiple entities with the standard interfaces of Linq2Sql – not [...]