Performance analysis strategies

Posted by Bernd on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Bernd
Published on 2010-05-11T20:45:55Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 1:34 UTC
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Filed under:

Performance

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performance-tuning

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debugging

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Troubleshooting

I am assigned to a performance-tuning-debugging-troubleshooting task.

Scenario: a multi-application environment running on several networked machines using databases. OS is Unix, DB is Oracle. Business logic is implemented across applications using synchronous/asynchronous communication. Applications are multi-user with several hundred call center users at peak time. User interfaces are web-based.

Applications are third party, I can get access to developers and source code. I only have the production system and a functional test environment, no load test environment.

Problem: bad performance! I need fast results. Management is going crazy.

I got symptom examples like these: user interface actions taking minutes to complete. Seaching for a customer usually takes 6 seconds but an immediate subsequent search with same parameters may take 6 minutes.

What would be your strategy for finding root causes?

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