Latest News from AJAX and ContinuousAPM

dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.6 Now Supports Firefox 11

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:18:00 EDT

With the new release of the dynaTrace AJAX Edition you have Beta support for the Firefox 11 browser and therefore you can test the performance of your Web sites with the latest available Browsers from Mozilla and Microsoft. The AJAX Edition now supports Firefox 10, 11 and Internet Explorer 8, 9! To help you prepare for the future we added Internet Explorer 10 (developer preview). If you also take care of the legacy browsers and automated browser testing, you should take a look at the dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium which helps you to guarantee a good performance for legacy, current and future browsers.

The Super Bowl Effect on Website Performance

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

Whether or not you are a fan of U.S. football – it was really hard to avoid this huge sports event on February 5. In addition to the actual game, it’s the Super Bowl commercials that – besides being very expensive to air – usually drive a lot of load on the websites of the companies that run their ads. The question is whether the millions of dollars spent really drive consumers to these websites and make them do business with them. As we won't get an answer from the top brands that advertised about the actual conversion rates we can look at the End User Experience and performance of their websites while these ads were aired. By analyzing the data that we can get through continuous synthetic monitoring combined with deep dive browser diagnostics, we’ll be able to see whether their web application was actually able to handle the load and didn't leave too many of these users with a bad user experience.

Why You Have Less Than a Second to Deliver Exceptional Performance

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:45:00 EST

The success of the Web performance movement shows that there is increasing interest and value in fast websites. That faster websites lead to more revenue and reduced costs is a well-proven fact today. So being exceptionally fast is becoming the dogma for developing web applications. But what is exceptionally fast and how hard is it to build a top performing web site? First we have to define what exceptionally fast really means. Certainly it means faster than just meeting user expectations. We have to look at user expectations first. A great source for which response times people expect from software is this book. It provides really good insight into time perception in software. I highly recommend it to any anybody who works in the performance space.

Five Years Later: OpenAJAX Who?

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:45:00 EDT

Five years ago the OpenAjax Alliance was founded with the intention of providing interoperability between what was quickly becoming a morass of AJAX-based libraries and APIs. Where is it today, and why has it failed to achieve more prominence?

I stumbled recently over a nearly five year old article I wrote in 2006 for Network Computing on the OpenAjax initiative. Remember, AJAX and Web 2.0 were just coming of age then, and mentions of Web 2.0 or AJAX were much like that of “cloud” today. You couldn’t turn around without hearing someone promoting their solution by associating with Web 2.0 or AJAX. After reading the opening paragraph I remembered clearly writing the article and being skeptical, even then, of what impact such an alliance would have on the industry. Being a developer by trade I’m well aware of how impactful “standards” and “specifications” really are in the real world, but the problem – interoperability across a growing field of JavaScript libraries – seemed at the time real and imminent, so there was a need for someone to address it before it completely got out of hand.

With the OpenAjax Alliance comes the possibility for a unified language, as well as a set of APIs, on which developers could easily implement dynamic Web applications. A unified toolkit would offer consistency in a market that has myriad Ajax-based technologies in play, providing the enterprise with a broader pool of developers able to offer long term support for applications and a stable base on which to build applications. As is the case with many fledgling technologies, one toolkit will become the standard—whether through a standards body or by de facto adoption—and Dojo is one of the favored entrants in the race to become that standard.

-- AJAX-based Dojo Toolkit , Network Computing, Oct 2006

The goal was simple: interoperability. The way in which the alliance went about achieving that goal, however, may have something to do with its lackluster performance lo these past five years and its descent into obscurity.

5 YEAR ACCOMPLISHMENTS of the OPENAJAX ALLIANCE

The OpenAjax Alliance members have not been idle. They have published several very complete and well-defined specifications including one “industry standard”: OpenAjax Metadata.

OpenAjax Hub

The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript functionality defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that addresses key interoperability and security issues that arise when multiple Ajax libraries and/or components are used within the same web page. (OpenAjax Hub 2.0 Specification)

OpenAjax Metadata

OpenAjax Metadata represents a set of industry-standard metadata defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that enhances interoperability across Ajax toolkits and Ajax products (OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 Specification)
OpenAjax Metadata defines Ajax industry standards for an XML format that describes the JavaScript APIs and widgets found within Ajax toolkits. (OpenAjax Alliance Recent News)

It is interesting to see the calling out of XML as the format of choice on the OpenAjax Metadata (OAM) specification given the recent rise to ascendancy of JSON as the preferred format for developers for APIs. Granted, when the alliance was formed XML was all the rage and it was believed it would be the dominant format for quite some time given the popularity of similar technological models such as SOA, but still – the reliance on XML while the plurality of developers race to JSON may provide some insight on why OpenAjax has received very little notice since its inception.

Ignoring the XML factor (which undoubtedly is a fairly impactful one) there is still the matter of how the alliance chose to address run-time interoperability with OpenAjax Hub (OAH) – a hub. A publish-subscribe hub, to be more precise, in which OAH mediates for various toolkits on the same page. Don summed it up nicely during a discussion on the topic: it’s page-level integration. This is a very different approach to the problem than it first appeared the alliance would take.

The article on the alliance and its intended purpose five years ago clearly indicate where I thought this was going – and where it should go: an industry standard model and/or set of APIs to which other toolkit developers would design and write such that the interface (the method calls) would be unified across all toolkits while the implementation would remain whatever the toolkit designers desired.

I was clearly under the influence of SOA and its decouple everything premise. Come to think of it, I still am, because interoperability assumes such a model – always has, likely always will. Even in the network, at the IP layer, we have standardized interfaces with vendor implementation being decoupled and completely different at the code base. An Ethernet header is always in a specified format, and it is that standardized interface that makes the Net go over, under, around and through the various routers and switches and components that make up the Internets with alacrity. Routing problems today are caused by human error in configuration or failure – never incompatibility in form or function.

Neither specification has really taken that direction. OAM – as previously noted – standardizes on XML and is primarily used to describe APIs and components - it isn’t an API or model itself. The Alliance wiki describes the specification: “The primary target consumers of OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 are software products, particularly Web page developer tools targeting Ajax developers.” Very few software products have implemented support for OAM. IBM, a key player in the Alliance, leverages the OpenAjax Hub for secure mashup development and also implements OAM in several of its products, including Rational Application Developer (RAD) and IBM Mashup Center. Eclipse also includes support for OAM, as does Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. The IDE working group has developed an open source set of tools based on OAM, but what appears to be missing is adoption of OAM by producers of favored toolkits such as jQuery, Prototype and MooTools. Doing so would certainly make development of AJAX-based applications within development environments much simpler and more consistent, but it does not appear to gaining widespread support or mindshare despite IBM’s efforts.

The focus of the OpenAjax interoperability efforts appears to be on a hub / integration method of interoperability, one that is certainly not in line with reality. While certainly developers may at times combine JavaScript libraries to build the rich, interactive interfaces demanded by consumers of a Web 2.0 application, this is the exception and not the rule and the pub/sub basis of OpenAjax which implements a secondary event-driven framework seems overkill. Conflicts between libraries, performance issues with load-times dragged down by the inclusion of multiple files and simplicity tend to drive developers to a single library when possible (which is most of the time). It appears, simply, that the OpenAJAX Alliance – driven perhaps by active members for whom solutions providing integration and hub-based interoperability is typical (IBM, BEA (now Oracle), Microsoft and other enterprise heavyweights – has chosen a target in another field; one on which developers today are just not playing.

It appears OpenAjax tried to bring an enterprise application integration (EAI) solution to a problem that didn’t – and likely won’t ever – exist. So it’s no surprise to discover that references to and activity from OpenAjax are nearly zero since 2009. Given the statistics showing the rise of JQuery – both as a percentage of site usage and developer usage – to the top of the JavaScript library heap, it appears that at least the prediction that “one toolkit will become the standard—whether through a standards body or by de facto adoption” was accurate.

Of course, since that’s always the way it works in technology, it was kind of a sure bet, wasn’t it?

WHY INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICE PROVIDERS and VENDORS CARE ABOUT DEVELOPER STANDARDS

You might notice in the list of members of the OpenAJAX alliance several infrastructure vendors. Folks who produce application delivery controllers, switches and routers and security-focused solutions. This is not uncommon nor should it seem odd to the casual observer. All data flows, ultimately, through the network and thus, every component that might need to act in some way upon that data needs to be aware of and knowledgeable regarding the methods used by developers to perform such data exchanges. In the age of hyper-scalability and über security, it behooves infrastructure vendors – and increasingly cloud computing providers that offer infrastructure services – to be very aware of the methods and toolkits being used by developers to build applications. Applying security policies to JSON-encoded data, for example, requires very different techniques and skills than would be the case for XML-formatted data. AJAX-based applications, a.k.a. Web 2.0, requires different scalability patterns to achieve maximum performance and utilization of resources than is the case for traditional form-based, HTML applications. The type of content as well as the usage patterns for applications can dramatically impact the application delivery policies necessary to achieve operational and business objectives for that application.

As developers standardize through selection and implementation of toolkits, vendors and providers can then begin to focus solutions specifically for those choices. Templates and policies geared toward optimizing and accelerating JQuery, for example, is possible and probable. Being able to provide pre-developed and tested security profiles specifically for JQuery, for example, reduces the time to deploy such applications in a production environment by eliminating the test and tweak cycle that occurs when applications are tossed over the wall to operations by developers. For example, the jQuery.ajax() documentation states:

By default, Ajax requests are sent using the GET HTTP method. If the POST method is required, the method can be specified by setting a value for the type option. This option affects how the contents of the data option are sent to the server. POST data will always be transmitted to the server using UTF-8 charset, per the W3C XMLHTTPRequest standard.

The data option can contain either a query string of the form key1=value1&key2=value2, or a map of the form {key1: 'value1', key2: 'value2'}. If the latter form is used, the data is converted into a query string using jQuery.param() before it is sent. This processing can be circumvented by setting processData to false. The processing might be undesirable if you wish to send an XML object to the server; in this case, change the contentType option from application/x-www-form-urlencoded to a more appropriate MIME type.

Web application firewalls that may be configured to detect exploitation of such data – attempts at SQL injection, for example – must be able to parse this data in order to make a determination regarding the legitimacy of the input. Similarly, application delivery controllers and load balancing services configured to perform application layer switching based on data values or submission URI will also need to be able to parse and act upon that data. That requires an understanding of how jQuery formats its data and what to expect, such that it can be parsed, interpreted and processed.

By understanding jQuery – and other developer toolkits and standards used to exchange data – infrastructure service providers and vendors can more readily provide security and delivery policies tailored to those formats natively, which greatly reduces the impact of intermediate processing on performance while ensuring the secure, healthy delivery of applications.

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Why Response Times Are Often Measured Incorrectly

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Response times are in many – if not in most – cases the basis for performance analysis. When they are within expected boundaries everything is ok. When they get to high we start optimizing our applications. So response times play a central role in performance monitoring and analysis. In virtualized and cloud environments they are the most accurate performance metric you can get. Very often, however, people measure and interpret response times the wrong way. This is more than reason enough to discuss the topic of response time measurements and how to interpret them. Therefore I will discuss typical measurement approaches, the related misunderstandings and how to improve measurement approaches.

How Bad Outdated JavaScript Libraries Are for Page Load Time

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Last week at Velocity we hosted a Birds of a Feather Session (BoF) and offered the attendees to analyze their web sites using dynaTrace Ajax Edition. Besides finding the typical performance problems (no cache settings, too many images, not minimized content, …) we found several sites that had one interesting problem in common: OLD VERSIONS of JavaScript libraries such as YUI, jQuery or SPRY.

Following Best Practices

Tue, 31 May 2011 14:26:00 EDT

From time to time I access my work emails through Outlook Web Access (OWA) – which works really great on all browsers I run on my laptop (IE, FF, Chrome). Guessing that Microsoft probably optimized OWA for its own browser I thought that I will definitely find JavaScript code that doesn’t execute that well on Firefox as compared to Internet Explorer. From an end users perspective there seems to be no noticeable performance difference – but – using dynaTrace Ajax Edition (also check out the Video Tutorials) I found a very interesting JavaScript method that shows a big performance difference when iterating over DOM elements.

Application Performance Management in WebSphere Environments

Thu, 12 May 2011 08:45:00 EDT

Just in time for the upcoming Webinar with The BonTon Stores, where we talk about the challenges in operating complex WebSphere environments, we had another set of prospects running their applications on WebSphere. Francis Cordon, a colleague of mine, shares some of the screenshots resulting from these engagements. In this blog I want to highlight important areas when managing performance in WebSphere environments. This includes WebSphere Health Monitoring, End-to-End Performance Analysis, Performance and Business Impact Analysis as well as WebSphere Memory Analysis and Management. More details will be discussed during the Webinar on May 25th – so check it out if you are interested.

Application Performance Monitoring in Production

Wed, 11 May 2011 11:15:00 EDT

Last time I explained logical and organizational prerequisites to a successful production level application performance monitoring. I originally wanted to look at the concrete metrics we need on every tier, but was asked how you can correlate data in a distributed environment, so this will be the first thing that we look into. So let’s take a look at the technical prerequisites of successful production monitoring.

Tips on Creating Stable Functional Web Tests

Tue, 10 May 2011 10:00:00 EDT

In the last week my task was to create stable functional tests for a new eCommerce application. We picked several use cases, e.g.: clicking through the different links, logging in, searching for products and actually buying a product. We needed functional tests that run on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. With these tests we want to make sure to automatically find any functional problems but also performance and architectural problems (e.g: too many JavaScript files on the site, too many exceptions on the server or too many database statements executed for a certain test scenario). We also want to find problems that happen on certain browsers – therefore the task of letting these tests run on the two major browsers.

Application Performance & Architectural Problems You Can Find in an Hour

Thu, 05 May 2011 10:30:00 EDT

When we get engaged with prospects that are interested in our performance management solution we walk them through a Proof of Concept. We let them install dynaTrace on their own prior to the actual POC. During the POC we ask them to exercise typical use cases on their application that show performance problems. We walk them through the different analysis options and add the findings to a final POC Presentation. In this blog I want to share some screenshots and findings of a typical Proof of Concept recently done in a heterogeneous .NET/Java Environment.

The Cost of an Exception

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:30:00 EDT

Recently there was a bigger discussion at dynaTrace around the cost of exceptions. When working with customers we very often find a lot of exceptions they are not aware of. After removing these exceptions, the code runs significantly faster than before. This creates the assumption that using exceptions in your code comes with a significant performance overhead. The implication would be that you better avoid using exceptions. As exceptions are an important construct for handling error situation, avoiding exceptions completely does not seem to be good solution. All in all this was reason enough to have a closer look at the costs of throwing exceptions.

Premium AJAX Edition 3 Extensions

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:45:00 EDT

If you are serious about Web Development then I am sure you are working on Web 2.0 Applications leveraging several JavaScript Frameworks, making XHR calls to the Server to retrieve dynamic content and also include 3rd party content such as Ads or Social Network Plugins. You probably also have Selenium, WebDriver or any other functional tests in place that get executed in your Continuous Integration environment. If any of this is true, you likely want to automate your efforts around web performance optimization as it is too complex and inefficient to verify performance manually on all your pages across all your supported browsers. dynaTrace offers premium extensions to the free dynaTrace AJAX Edition that can accelerate your tasks through enterprise-class automation. Let’s look at the main capabilities this upgrade gives you.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0 Released

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:15:00 EDT

With its latest release, dynaTrace updates its Product Suite for Deep Dive, Automated Cross-Browser Web Performance Optimization with two products: dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0 is the free standalone tool that has been downloaded by 30k+ users so far supporting both Firefox (3.6, 4.0) and Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8) dynaTrace Development Team Edition is the Premium Upgrade and provides extended automation, end-to-end performance and automated regression analysis for modern Web 2.0 Applications

Real-Life AJAX Troubleshooting Guide

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:00:00 EDT

One of our clients occasionally runs into the following problem with their web app: They host their B2B web application in their East Coast Data Center with their clients accessing the app from all around the United States. Occasionally they have clients complaining about bad page load times or that certain features just don’t work on their browsers. When the problem can’t be reproduced in-house and all of the “usual suspects” (problem with internet connection, faulty proxy, user error, …) are ruled out they actually have to fly out an engineer to the client to analyze the problem on-site. That’s a lot of time and money spent to troubleshoot a problem.

Application Performance Almanac 2010

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:46:00 EST

2010 is over and there has been a lot going on in the application performance space. We started this project at the beginning of the year inspired by Stoyan Stefanov’s performance advent calendar of 2009. (There is also one for 2010). Now twelve months later we have our 2010 performance almanac available. According to Wikipedia an almanac is -”… an annual publication containing information in a particular field”. Our performance almanac contains nearly 50 articles of numerous topics around application performance.

Five Steps to Set Up ShowSlow as a Web Performance Repository

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

Alois Reitbauer explained in detail how dynaTrace continuously monitors several thousand URLs and uploads the performance data to the public ShowSlow.com instance. More and more of our dynaTrace AJAX Community Members are taking advantage of this integration in their internal testing environments. They either use Selenium, Watir or other functional testing tools to continuously test their web applications. They use the free dynaTrace AJAX edition to capture performance metrics such as Time to First Impression, Time to Fully Loaded, Number of Network Requests or Size of the Site. ShowSlow is then used to receive those performance beacons, stores it in a repository and provides a nice Web UI to analyze the captured data over time. The following illustration shows a graph from the public ShowSlow instance that contains performance results for a tested website of a period of several months:

Using HTML5 Application Cache to Create Offline Web Applications

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:45:00 EST

HTML5 introduces Application Cache, a new feature that enables you to make web apps and sites available offline. The new specification also provides an easy way to prefetch some or all of your web app’s assets (HTML files, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on) while the client is still online. During this caching process, files are stored in an application cache, where they sit ready for future offline use. Compare this to regular browser caching, in which pages that you visit are cached in the browser’s cache based on server-side rules and client-side configuration. But—even if web pages are cached normally, this does not provide a reliable way for you to access pages while you’re in offline mode (in an airplane, for example). In addition, an application cache can cache pages that have not been visited at all and are therefore typically unavailable in the regular browser cache. Prefetching files can even speed up your site’s performance, though you are of course using bandwidth to download those files initially.

Antivirus Add-On for IE Causing Load Time Problems

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:00:00 EST

So it seems that the Antivirus Add-On in Internet Explorer is causing a major impact in page load time. The AV Add-On needs to check all loaded JavaScript files for malicious code. In the example of Pedro and Frank they load jQuery, several jQuery plugins and some custom JS. This slows down their page load time as the browser cannot continue downloading additional content until the JavaScript files have been fully downloaded and executed.

dynaTrace AJAX Edition Celebrates First Birthday with a New Version

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:16:00 EST

We are celebrating the first birthday of dynaTrace AJAX Edition with a new version of this deep-dive browser diagnostics tool for Internet Explorer. We just recently reached 20k+ active users and are glad that people like Steve Souders or John Resig endorsed this tool in the last year. Download it here! The early adopters already know the first version of this feature from our dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 Beta 1. Based on the Web Performance Optimization Best Practices from dynaTrace, Yahoo and Google we now grade different aspects of the analyzed web site. We look at the usage of Network Caching, Number of Resources on the page, Server-Side and JavaScript Performance as well as overall page load timings. dynaTrace AJAX Edition celebrates its first birthday with a new version Thanks for all the great feedback on our dynaTrace Forums, on our blog posts or through twitter. Our community has driven this release and the enhancements we made. The Good News is: there is more to come :-)

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:28:58 EDT

Web Performance Optimization (WPO) constitutes of a set of activities targeted at improving the performance of web applications. First coined by Steve Souders WPO is developing into a growing industry. Every month new companies and projects offering web performance services emerge. WPO is much more than performance analysis; however, performance analysis is a central part in WPO activities as you must first have the data to decide what you are targeting and even more important to create a business case for web performance in your organization.

Architecting Success: A Comprehensive SaaS Solution

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:45:00 EDT

In 2005, our company, ServusXchange LLC, was a fledgling SaaS information technology startup focused on business process and workflow collaboration solutions. Led by our co-founder, Brian Javeline, we identified an emerging opportunity, an unanswered need in the home remodeling and repair industry: contractors, who don’t typically spend a lot of time in an office, needed a better way to do business. We felt we could engineer a comprehensive SaaS solution that would allow contractors to both streamline their business operations and improve interaction with customers, subcontractors, and vendors. By finding and leveraging the right commercial controls, we were able to successfully complete the project on time and on budget.

How We Monitor Our Community Portal from the Cloud

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:31:38 EDT

Our dynaTrace Community Portal is our gateway to our users. Especially with the rapidly-growing number of world-wide users of our FREE dynaTrace AJAX Edition, it is necessary to keep track on how well our pages perform from around the globe to satisfy our “performance hungry” community :-) There are two important questions we want to get answered: * How Fast or Slow are pages from different regions in the world? * YSlow? In case of a slow page we need to figure out whether the problem is caused by slow network connections, static content deliver or dynamic application code

Web Performance Optimization (WPO)

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:50:51 EDT

In his latest blog post, Steve Souders writes about the impact of performance on business success. I am not going to duplicate his content here as you can just go ahead and read his blog. I just want to highlight some very interesting points and give you some links to follow up resources. Performance Is Now Officially Business Critical Fred Wilson, a top VC investing in companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy and FeedBurner spoke about the 10 Golden Principals of Successful Web Apps. The #1 item on the list was Performance: “First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it …”

Is There a Business Case for Application Performance?

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:02:00 EDT

We all know that slow performance – and service disruption even more – affects our business services and eventually our revenue. At the same time we say that major parts of companies are not willing to invest in performance. In this article I will discuss why we find ourselves in this paradox and how to escape it. dynaTrace recently conducted a study on performance management in large and small companies. The quick facts paint a horrible picture. 6o percent of the companies admit that they do not have any performance management processes installed or what they have is ineffective. Half of the companies who answered that they have performance management processes admitted that they are doing it only in a reactive way when problems occur. One third of all companies said that management is not supporting performance management properly. From this data we can obviously conclude that performance management is not a primary interest in most companies.

Developers Think Functionality

Thu, 20 May 2010 13:01:00 EDT

Two weeks ago I co-hosted a Webinar with one of our users – Bill Mar, Director of Engineering Services from SmithMicro Software. SmithMicro provides the backbone of our digital life by connecting different digital devices together. In his role, Bill works in the Wireless Business unit working on Voice-related services, e.g.: VoiceSMS or Visual Voicemail – services that we’ve all become used to since we run around with smart phones such as the iPhone or Blackberry. Bill talked about how SmithMicro had to move towards Proactive Performance Management as the company and the user base started to grow. In his presentation he made an interesting but bold statement: Developers Think Functionality – But Less About Scalability.

Building Your Own Amazon CloudWatch Monitor in Five Steps

Wed, 05 May 2010 12:45:00 EDT

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 the free and open-source dynaTrace plugin for agent-less cloud monitoring. Some parts however have been simplified or omitted in tutorial. The major parts that are missing in this sample are dynamic discovery of EC2 instances and an algorithm which is a bit more reliable and accurate in retrieving monitoring data.

Optimizing Data Intensive Web Pages by Example

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:00:23 EDT

Lately I was checking out ShowSlow. The site is really great. It combines YSlow and PageSpeed metrics and visualizes them in a really nice way. When I clicked on the URLs Measured Tab I had to wait quite some time until the page finished downloading. While this page is really displaying a lot of information, I still wondered why it takes so long to load. I then used dynaTrace AJAX Edition to analyze the page. Then the reason for the long load time became obvious. As you can see below the page has an overall download time of 17 seconds which results from a total size of 5 MB of HTML data.

Challenges in Tracing JavaScript Performance by Example

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:43:46 EDT

In an earlier article I already discussed several approaches towards end-user experience (or performance) monitoring including their pros and cons. In this article I will present a simple real world sample which shows the limits of performance traceability in AJAX applications. As I don’t like Hello World samples, I thought I’d rather build something a bit more useful. The sample uses the Twitter API to search for keywords. The search itself is triggered by typing into a textbox. While the sample isn’t spectacular from a technical perspective, I will make it more interesting by adding some “technical salt” – rather than sugar.

How to Avoid the Top Five SharePoint Performance Mistakes

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:33:06 EDT

SharePoint is without question a fast-growing platform and Microsoft is making lots of money with it. It’s been around for almost a decade and grew from a small list and document management application into an application development platform on top of ASP.NET using its own API to manage content in the SharePoint Content Database. Over the years many things have changed – but some haven’t – like – SharePoint still uses a single database table to store ALL items in any SharePoint List. And this brings me straight into the #1 problem I have seen when working with companies that implemented their own solution based on SharePoint.

Applying Maslow’s Pyramid to Application Performance

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:45:00 EDT

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.

Identify Performance Bottlenecks in Your BizTalk Environment - Part 3

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:00:00 EDT

In my last two articles I wrote about how to Use BizTalk Performance Counters and how to Analyze Adapter and Pipeline Performance. In this final article I focus on Orchestration and calling external services. Orchestrations can be as simple as reading a file from a file system, transforming it and writing it out to a different file. They can also be much more complex such as calling external web services depending on certain conditions in the incoming messages, taking the response of these services and calling other services or writing a transformed version of the response to a file or the database. The following screenshot shows a rather simple Orchestration taken from one of the examples that ships with BizTalk.

How to Make Developers Write Performance Tests

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:46:18 EDT

I had an interesting conversation with our Test Automation team lead Stefan – who Andi interviewed for our “Eating our own Dog Food ” article – on his experiences with the willingness of developers to write performance tests. I asked a provocative question: do developers really want to write them in the first place? First he smiled but then he said that they do. I honestly was a bit surprised because in my own experience as a developer was that I rather wanted to write code instead of tests.

Hunting Lost Treasures: Understanding and Finding Memory Leaks

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:15:00 EST

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 problems by covering how to find those problems and providing some insights into the anatomy of memory leaks. What do we need for effective memory diagnosis? We need a heap analyzer for analyzing heap content and a console to collect and visualize runtime performance metrics. Then we are well-equipped for our expedition. Which tools you are going to choose depends on the platform you are using, the money you want to spend and your personal preferences. The range goes from JVM tools, to open source tools to professional performance management solutions.

Identify Performance Bottlenecks in Your BizTalk Environment

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:15:00 EST

In Part I of this series I gave a general overview of BizTalk - the components that are involved in message processing and talked about how BizTalk specific performance counters can help spotting problematic areas. In this article we go beyond performance counters (even though we still need them) and take a deep-dive into adapters and pipelines.

Myths and Truths About Performance Measurement Overhead

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:15:00 EST

In this third article of my Performance Almanac I discuss the role of overhead in performance management. As a performance management solution provider we’re frequently asked “How much overhead does your solution have?” This question is however a bit more complex to answer than just giving a single number. When discussing this topic I have also realized that there are some dogmas on people’s minds which are not necessarily true. I collected the most common myths and truths about performance measurement overhead and will discuss them in this article.

Eating Our Own Dog Food: dynaTrace Does Continuous APM

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST

Obviously dynaTrace takes performance very seriously as we preach to our clients that Continuous Application Performance Management is critical across the Application Lifecycle. The earlier in the Lifecycle you manage and get your performance under control the less you have to worry about actual problems later on when you ship your product. In the discussion I had with dynaTrace Test Automation Lead Stefan Frandl, he talked about how dynaTrace transitioned from traditional performance management to where we are now – which means: “eat our own dog food” and “live the dynaTrace Continuous APM message”.

Ensuring Website Performance

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:45:00 EST

In order to ensure that end user response times are acceptable at all times it is necessary to measure the time in the way the end user perceives performance. Measuring and monitoring your live system is important to identify problems early on before it affects too many end users. In order to make sure that web pages are fast from the start it is very important to constantly and continuously measure web page performance throughout the development phase and in testing. There are two questions that need to be answered * What is the time the user actually perceives as web response time? * How to measure it accurately and in an automated way?

How to Avoid .NET Performance Problems

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

Every time I work with one of our .NET customers to help them with managing their application performance I come across the same problems as seen with other clients before: lots of ADO.NET queries, many hidden exceptions in core or 3rd party .NET libraries, slow 3rd party components, inefficient custom code … Too often we at dynaTrace are introduced when it is already very late in the development cycle. Most of the time we're introduced when the first performance test results show bad response times and nobody understands why it is that slow. In other cases we get called when there are problems in production and it has already taken too much time to figure out the root cause. Solving these problems at that point can become really expensive as it sometimes involves changes to the architecture. Most of these problems can be prevented by following some basic principles from the start of the project. In this article I cover some of the problems I’ve seen and I encourage everybody to read the paper I wrote on Performance Management for .NET Applications that covers this problem domain in detail.

A Step-by-Step Guide to dynaTrace AJAX Edition

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

The dynaTrace AJAX Edition has been out there as an Alpha for a couple of weeks. It gave you the first impression what was to come. All the feedback we have received (like that from Steve Souders, and all that has come in via the contact form and the online forum) in that time made it possible to improve the tool from its early versions to its first "official" release version.

Optimizing the Performance of Web Applications

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:00:34 EST

Web applications provided to users have increased in function and capability, while increasing value in support of business goals, yet has web application performance kept pace with end users' increasing expectations and escalating demands? The latest research from Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), demonstrates how top organizations make optimal web application performance.

The Problem with SLA Monitoring in Virtualized Environments

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:35:00 EDT

Because virtual machines work by time-sharing host physical hardware, a virtual machine cannot exactly duplicate the timing behaviour of a physical machine. This leads to the timekeeping problems explained in the VMWare White Paper about Timekeeping in Virtual Machines that results in inaccurate time measurements within the virtual machine. This affects ALL performance metrics that rely on the operating system clock time to keep track of time which includes system counters like CPU or I/O Utilization. Performance Management solutions therefore run into the problem that the monitored metrics are inaccurate and can lead to incorrect enforcement of SLAs or wrong assumptions about application performance.

Get more out of functional web testing: How to correlate test reports with server side log information?

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:17:35 EDT

Scenario: different test types target the same test machine For smaller software projects – where deployment and configuration of the application to test is easy – you often find separate installations for individual testers or test types. This allows every tester to work against an installation without impacting other test activities. For large enterprise software projects, however, it’s [...] Related posts:

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JavaOne 2009: Open Source Project Stonehenge

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Microsoft and Sun recently announced their Open Source Project Stonehenge at the JavaOne conference. Stonehenge is a reference implementation that shows how to bridge the two major development platforms Java and .NET using Web Services. This initiative definitely puts the spotlight on heterogeneity and the challenges that come with it. Interoperability on the platform level is [...] Related posts:

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Inability to measure SLAs around application performance

Tue, 26 May 2009 06:54:30 EDT

The 2008 Aberdeen Report on Application Performance Management listed the top challenges for Application Performance Management. The Inablity to measure SLAs around application performance is in the top 5 list. <a href="http://blog.dynatrace.com"Find out what the challenges of todays applications are in respect to SLA enforcement></a>

Challenges of Running Apps in “The Cloud”

Thu, 07 May 2009 09:51:00 EDT

Cloud Computing presents unique opportunities to companies to reduce costs, outsource non-core functions and scale costs to match demand. However, the Cloud also presents a new level of complexity that makes ensuring application performance in the Cloud a unique challenge, in particular with the many different usage and deployment scenarios available. Perhaps the most popular present scenario uses the Cloud to perform certain tasks where additional computational power is unavailable in a local environment, e.g.: running large scale load-tests or processing large amounts of input data into something else. Another scenario which is becoming more attractive these days is to actually run applications in the Cloud. Read more about the challenges of Monitoring, Tracing and Profiling applications that run in the cloud @ http://blog.dynatrace.com/2009/05/07/challenges-of-monitoring-tracing-an...

dynaTrace Launches Community Portal for SOA Applications

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:30:00 EST

dynaTrace software announced the launch of the dynaTrace Community Portal. This portal will provide the expanding dynaTrace ecosystem with a dynamic resource for sharing knowledge, best practices, product tips and techniques, training materials and re-useable software modules. With the community portal, customers will have access to the information and software they need to accelerate their deployment of dynaTrace-enabled application performance management solutions across the full development, test and production lifecycle.

dynaTrace3 Released for APM for SOA, Java and .Net

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:00:00 EST

dynaTrace software has announced the release of dynaTrace 3. As companies continue to develop and deploy more sophisticated enterprise SOA, Java and .Net applications across the globe, the requirements for APM solutions have significantly expanded. dynaTrace 3 is designed to meet the new demands of performance management across the full application lifecycle. Some of the new features include: Global transaction tracing with deep diagnostics for Java and .Net applications: now developers, test and production operators can trace business transactions across geographically distributed applications to find and prevent performance issues before they happen 24x7 performance management for the most demanding environments - dynaTrace scales across large server clusters and virtualized environments and will easily meet the growing demands of your changing production environments

iTKO LISA, dynaTrace Partner for Federated SOA Testing

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:00:00 EDT

iTKO LISA, the provider of testing, validation and virtualization solutions for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) and enterprise software, and dynaTrace software, the provider of lifecycle application performance management for complex SOA-based systems, announce a combined solution that offers defense customers complete visibility into the quality and reliability of key software applications.

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:03:40 EDT

In my last article I discussed benchmarking as the first use case for Web Performance Optimization (WPO). This time I will take a closer look at optimization. After we have discovered how our site behaves compared to our competition – or any reference we might want to benchmark against – we want to learn how to improve our user experience. We will therefore have a look at different approaches towards optimization.