Web site designers - CHAPTER 6 Performance Tuning Methodology
CHAPTER 6 Performance Tuning Methodology I have been reading about performance tuning on our application server vendor s Web site, and it looks so complicated. There are all of these ratios that I need to watch and formulas to apply them to. And which ones are the most important? What s going on with this? John was getting frustrated with his tuning efforts. He had his team implementing the proactive performance testing methodology that I helped him with, but the concept of the bythe- book performance tuning was evading him. Don t let those ratios fool you there is a much better approach to performance tuning. Let me ask you, when you take your car in for service, does the service technician plug your car into a computer and tell you what s wrong with it, or does he ask you to describe your problems? Well of course he asks me about my problems, otherwise how would he know where to start looking? A car is a complicated machine, John replied. Exactly. There are so many moving parts that you wouldn t want to look at each one. Similarly, when tuning an enterprise application, we want to look at its architecture and common pathways to optimize those pathways. When we step back from application server ratios and focus on what the application does and how it uses the application server, the task becomes much easier. From the look on his face, I could see that he got it. He saw that the focus of tuning should be on the application, not on abstract ratios that he did not understand. Performance Tuning Overview Performance tuning is not a black art, but it is something that is not very well understood. When tasked with tuning an enterprise Java environment, you have three options: You can read through your application server s tuning documentation. You can adopt the brute-force approach of trial and error. You can hire professional services. The problem with the first approach is that the application server vendor documentation is usually bloated and lacks prioritization. It would be nice to have a simple step-by-step list of tasks to perform that realize the most benefit with the least amount of effort and the order in which to perform them, but alas, that does not exist. Furthermore, when consulted on best
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