Showing posts with label: Performance Almanac

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 [...]

This time I take an a bit unconventional approach towards defining performance management. The idea for this post came through a number of customer engagements, where the same question came up over and over again: “How do we start with Application Performance Management and what should we do?” Over time I developed a simple model [...]

Searching for memory leaks can easily become an adventure – fighting through a jungle of objects and references. When the leak occurs in production time is short and you have to act fast. Like in a treasure hunt, we have to interpret signs, unravel mysteries to finally find the “lost” memory.
Memory leaks – together with [...]

In this post I will address top ten reports and their usefulness in performance engineering. Regularly I hear people saying: “Can you show me the top ten database statements” or something similar. Their approach to performance engineering is to look at the slowest or most time-consuming statements and then make them faster. While this is [...]

In this third article of my Performance Almanac I discuss the role of overhead in performance management. As a performance management solution provider we’re frequently asked “How much overhead does your solution have?” This question is however a bit more complex to answer than just giving a single number.
When discussing this topic I [...]