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 [...]

Golfers follow the Masters 2011 – but – if you try to access masters.com right now you will get annoying popup messages from your browser telling you that you better stop JavaScript from executing because it takes too long. On my browser this looks like this: This happens on every page. So – why does [...]

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. [...]

// With its latest release, dynaTrace updates its Product Suite for Deep Dive, Automated Cross-Browser Web Performance Optimization with two products: dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0 is the free standalone tool that has been downloaded by 30k+ users so far supporting both Firefox (3.6, 4.0) and Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8 ) dynaTrace Development Team [...]

// If you are serious about Web Development then I am sure you are working on Web 2.0 Applications leveraging several JavaScript Frameworks, making XHR calls to the Server to retrieve dynamic content and also include 3rd party content such as Ads or Social Network Plugins. You probably also have Selenium, WebDriver or any other [...]

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 [...]

We blogged a lot about performance problems in Internet Explorer caused by the missing native implementation of getElementsByClassName (101 on jQuery Selector Performance, 101 on Prototype CSS Selectors, Top 10 Client Side Performance Problems, …). Firefox on the other side has always implemented this and other native lookup methods. This results in much faster page [...]

I recently got engaged with a client who ran an increasing load test against their load-balanced application. I got engaged because they had a phenomenon they couldn’t explain – here is an excerpt of the email: We have a jBoss application with mySQL that runs stable in a load testing environment with let’s say 20 [...]

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. [...]