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Performance, Scalability and Architecture

Andreas Grabner

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Top Stories by Andreas Grabner

Adding more memory to your JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) might be a temporary solution to fixing memory leaks in Java applications, but it for sure won't fix the root cause of the issue. Instead of crashing once per day it may just crash every other day. "Preventive" restarts are also just another desperate measure to minimize downtime, but, let's be frank: this is not how production issues should be solved. One of our customers - a large online retail store - ran into such an issue. They run one of their online gift card self-service interfaces on two JVMs. During peak holiday seasons when users are activating their gift cards or checking the balance, crashes due to OOM (Out Of Memory) were more frequent, which caused bad user experience. The first "measure" they took was to double the JVM Heap Size. This didn't solve the problem as JVMs were still crashing, so the... (more)

.NET and SharePoint Performance

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. It turns out that ServicePointManager comes with a default setting that allows two concurrent connections. If you happen to have a SharePo... (more)

Analyzing Webpage Performance with AJAX Edition 4

It's been a while since we released the last major version of Compuware dynaTrace AJAX Edition. With AJAX Edition 4 we introduce the capability to test across all versions of Internet Explorer (IE) starting with IE6 and all versions of Firefox starting with 3.6. Why is this important? Well, check out the test results of several pages we tested on IE6, 7 and 8 and contrast them with tests of the same pages using Firefox 16 and 18. A product page on Zappos.com loads in 1.3 seconds in Firefox 18 as compared to 5.6 seconds in IE6. That is four times slower on IE's rather ancient bro... (more)

How Bon-Ton Stores Align Business Goals with IT Requirements

Two or three times a year, Bon-Ton Stores products are featured on Jill's "Steals and Deals" segment on the "Today Show." The products are promoted with huge discounts. As soon as the segment first airs on the East Coast, the "Steals and Deals" site displays the featured products, with links to Bon-Ton's site, usually directly to the deal itself with a special promotion or coupon code. The questions that come up for the business owners are: How successful are these campaigns? What is impacting campaign success? How do we ensure better alignment with IT for future promotions? How... (more)

Building and Maintaining an Application Performance Community

Two years ago, my team decided to extend our community portal to become "a real"APM Community where members (both commercial and free products) can go to find help and educational content on all topics regarding Application Performance Management (APM). The most critical pieces to that community were: free access to all relevant content (documentation, best practices, knowledge base, downloads) as well as a very active discussion forum where members can get answers to their questions. Two years later I have to say we achieved this goal with more than 60,000 registered members. In... (more)