Web application performance analysis

By: Rajesh Chellamani, Wolters Kluwer

Presented by Rajesh Chellamani, Wolters Kluwer. Identifying and addressing potential performance bottlenecks early in a project development lifecycle will help save time, money and reduce stress and fatigue of software developers. This leads to successful product launch and improves customer satisfaction from all perspectives. There are a lot of white papers for both application performance testing as well as performance analysis by web application server vendors as well as by database server vendors. But, there are very few guides available that provide processes and techniques for an end to end performance analysis for web applications that typically cover both web server and database server. This paper contains techniques to help analyze application architecture for performance issues. A process using excel spreadsheet templates along with response time and server resource budgeting to help identify performance bottlenecks. This will help project teams take corrective actions before coding and avoid costly redesign of the application at a later point in the lifecycle. This method works well for enhancements of existing applications as well as for new applications. The paper also contains techniques to analyze performance issues in live production sites. The technique requires proactive monitoring of both web server and database server resource utilization levels and comparing it against previously observed normal levels for a given load profile. Proactive monitoring of database transaction per second and the associated Disk I/O, memory and CPU used will show performance issues on the database while simple resource utilization monitoring on the web servers will point to potential performance issues.