When building distributed applications one of the central performance-critical components is serialization. Most modern frameworks make it very easy to send data over the wire. In many cases you don’t see at all what is going on behind the scenes. Choosing the right serialization strategy however is central for achieving good performance and scalability. Serialization [...]

Lucy Monahan is a Principal Performance QA Engineer at Novell, and helps to manage their distributed Agile process. Intermittent problems can be difficult to solve: the value may be corrupted potentially at any time before the value is used the transaction may involve multiple enterprise servers using remote calls and the root cause could be [...]

Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. During development these problems often do not surface.  Then suddenly in load testing or [...]

On a recent project I had to call Java REST services from a .NET Client. Several problems came up – ranging from authentication to hidden performance issues. I want to share my lessons learned and encourage you to share your own opinions and experiences on this topic. The Context: REST to automate analysis processes in [...]