Paul van den Bogaard his weblog

Thinking about performance tuning

Performance tuning is not asking questions like "Are all patches installed? Is the deployment done in an acceptable way? What decision process was used to determine that this application can run on the given hardware?"
However questions like these popup. And too often the answers are not available... While at the same time the engineers want to tune; want to show they master this craft.
I believe a sanity check is the first thing that needs to be done when there is a perceived problem. It is this kind of work that might give you huge improvements. But at least should give you a sound and solid baseline to be used for a realistic setting of expectations.
Once an application is deployed in a proper way --and limitation are known, stated and documented-- are we able to set a baseline. Benefits from performance tuning should now be related to this baseline.
Any change in the stated limitations will present us with a new situation. If, for example, you are able to buy more disks for a disk bound application than indeed you can expect a nice improvement. However to run an IO intensive application on an environment severely deprived of IO capacity, was not a sane thing to begin with... Indeed it can be difficult to see where sanity checking ends and performance tuning begins.

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performance-tuning, sanity-check

Posted at 08:20AM Oct 24, 2006 by paulvandenbogaard in Performance  |  Comments[0]