Alois Reitbauer

In this article 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 goes wrong Rule 1 – Understand the Application While this may sound trivial and the most obvious thing to do – reality paints a different picture. Most failing application performance management processes originate from people’s lack of understanding of their application. This does not mean that the people involved in the process do not possess the knowledge to solve the problem. The case is rather that they do not have enough data to understand what is really going on in the application itself. ... (more)

Applying Maslow’s Pyramid to Application Performance

This time I take an a bit of an unconventional approach towards defining performance management. The idea for this article 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 which I called the performance management pyramid. The basic idea is to assign performance management activities to several levels. Each level serves a specific need and builds on top of the lower ones. Just like a building it starts with the b... (more)

The Proactivity of Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting of performance problems is very often - if not almost always - viewed as a reactive activity. Frankly, I have often seen it done in such a reactive fashion as a firefight; however, effective troubleshooting should build upon a solid diagnostic process. If you handle troubleshooting as if firefighting rather than based on solid diagnosis, this inevitably is a sign you have failed to take the right proactive measures. The goal of troubleshooting is to resolve an immediate performance problem - ideally yesterday. As some might expect this does not start when the probl... (more)

Hunting Lost Treasures: Understanding and Finding Memory Leaks

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 inefficient object creation and incorrect garbage collector configuration – are the top memory problems. While they are a typical runtime problem, their analysis and resolution worries developers. Therefore I will focus in this post on how to analyze memory pr... (more)

Building Your Own Amazon CloudWatch Monitor in Five Steps

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer 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 them or add another tool to your monitoring infrastructure. This post will provide step-by-step guidance on how to extend your monitoring solution to retrieve cloud metrics. The code sample is based on t... (more)