A blend of opinions & news on tech topics like cloud, mobile, big data, app development and app performance from geniuses inside the technology industry.
We hope you’ll both enjoy and benefit from this inside look at the practice of application performance management and monitoring. The authors’ goal is to provide actionable insight on tuning, testing, and the finer elements of performance enhancement on all web, mobile, and enterprise applications.
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To help illustrate my point, our pretend e-commerce example will be referred to as TescaraHats. They are a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats and did not achieve the expected sales increase with its new e-commerce site. It offered its customers the ability to customize and order hats online instead of visiting its brick and mortar locations, but customers seemed disinterested. TescaraHats learned quickly that there is much … [Read more...]
I consider myself a bit of a multitasker. Not necessarily by choice, but because I don’t have ANY patience for load time while researching, browsing or communicating online. During my standard web browsing session I’ll click on some sub-page link for something in one tab, jump to another to change the music track I’m listening to, jump to another to google something and then jump back to the original tab with the finally loaded sub-page I … [Read more...]
More than two years ago we posted summary blogs on About:Performance of the Top Server-Side Performance Problems and the Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems to give operations, architects, testers and developers easy to consume best practices. We feel that it is time to provide an update to these best practices as new problem patterns have since come into play. We also want to cover more than just problems that happen within your … [Read more...]
SharePoint is a popular choice for intranet applications and therefore it is important that it performs well to ensure employee productivity. Waiting ten seconds just to load the initial dashboard doesn’t necessarily support that. At a recent customer engagement we identified an interesting source of a potential performance problem that impacts ALL SharePoint and .NET-based installations that use the ServicePointManager to access web services. … [Read more...]
I love movies. There is just something about them that can teach us a lot about life. One of my favorites is Groundhog Day. The construct of this movie is that the main character Phil, played by Bill Murray, is trapped having to live the same day over and over again. This is what it can be like for IT when it comes to managing application performance. When a problem is detected in production, a “groundhog day” process is put into … [Read more...]
The other day I ran a Pig script. Nothing fancy; I loaded some data into HBase and then ran a second Pig job to do some aggregations. I knew the data loading would take some time as it was multiple GB of data, but I expected the second aggregation job to run much faster. It ran for over 15 hours and was not done at that time. This was too long in my mind and I terminated it. I was using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce as my Hadoop environment, so … [Read more...]
“It is all a matter of perspective!” This old adage rings particularly true when trying to solve a complex IT problem that spans mainframe, distributed, and mobile platforms. Mainframe programs are increasingly interfacing with distributed systems to support consumer facing web and mobile applications. When a transaction is initiated via a mobile phone, the path it takes from the edge of the Internet and deep into the mainframe and back … [Read more...]
At this time of year my thoughts turn to entertaining the family during their holiday visits. Being a gadget oriented geek, this means tuning the home theater and music systems. Coincidentally these thoughts mingled with my more usual contemplations about the challenges of Application Performance Management (APM). Before I share the collection of esoteric analogies, I feel compelled to explain the title of this blog. It is a tribute to the 1967 … [Read more...]
Outage Analyzer is a free new application that is being presented through the CloudSleuth portal (one of the recent projects I'm a contributor to). So far, it has been quite interesting to pop on there and get a current look at any outages that may be occurring in the Internet world. What is Outage Analyzer telling me? The very first question in my mind when I hit the site from is - What is the tool trying to tell me ? - Obviously, this is … [Read more...]
Even though HTML5, JavaScript and CSS are great technologies for building Rich Client Applications that run in the browser – many people continue to use “real” Rich Client Browser Technologies such as Flash and Silverlight as it provides greater flexibility in certain scenarios. From a User Experience Management (UEM) or Real User Monitoring (RUM) perspective these technologies are not really treated as first class citizens by most UEM/RUM … [Read more...]
