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 [...]
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 [...]
In this post I discuss the seven most important steps to improve your application performance practices. These simple-to-follow practices will help you to improve the way you deal with application performance. Besides eventually improving the performance of your applications it will help you to avoid playing the classical blame game which normally happens when something [...]
When something goes wrong who’s to blame? In this post I take a closer look at who is responsible when applications have performance problems. Interestingly very often the question as to who is responsible is at least as important as how to solve the problem. In order to not have to search for the responsible [...]
We all know that slow performance – and service disruption even more – affects our business services and eventually our revenue. At the same time we say that major parts of companies are not willing to invest in performance. In this post I will discuss why we find ourselves in this paradox and how to [...]
Amazon EC2 offers the CloudWatch service to monitor cloud instances as well as load balancers. While this service comes at some cost (0,015$/hour/instance) it offers useful infrastructure metrics about the performance of your EC2 infrastructure. While there are commercial and free tools out there which provide this service, you might not want to invest in [...]
Lately I was checking out ShowSlow. The site is really great. It combines YSlow and PageSpeed metrics and visualizes them in a really nice way. When I clicked on the URLs Measured Tab I had to wait quite some time until the page finished downloading. While this page is really displaying a lot of information, [...]
In an earlier post I already discussed several approaches towards end-user experience (or performance) monitoring including their pros and cons. In this post I will present a simple real-world sample which shows the limits of performance traceability in AJAX applications. As I don’t like Hello World samples, I thought I’d rather build something a bit [...]
