RightScale Conference Santa Clara 2011: We’ve all heard the stories of sites crashing and performing poorly, from major retailers – to iconic technology brands – to multinational airlines. lt’s only a matter of time before another story hits the headlines. Apica CEO, Sven Hammar, will review the importance of employing a strategic load testing and performance monitoring strategy to ensure that your web application doesn’t become another statistic. While outlining the actionable benefits of performance testing and analysis, Sven will touch on the common mistakes, discuss recent outages that hit the headlines, and share best practices to maintain optimal web performance and avoid system crashes.

1. Excellence in Cloud
Performance
Performance does
matter
5 things to consider
sven.hammar@apicasystem.com
Watch the video of this presentation

2. Situation Today
 Sites Continue to Crash
 Extremely Sluggish Response Times
 Why?
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3. How to handle the expected?
June 19, 2010
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4. How to prepare for the
unexpected?...
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5. Peak Load Problem
Load Server & Cloud
 Rapid Load Ramp-Up  Fixed Capacity
 Scalability
 Snowball Effect  Application Transparancy
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6. Tips & Suggestions
 #1 For peak and high load
 Small is Fast
 Have backup plan “minimalistic start/landing pages“
 #2 Extensive use of Front End Cache systems
 Optimize the cache solution, consider Varnish
 Less traffic is less problem, no direct DB access
 #3 Implement Scaling & Queuing System
 Redirect excess trafic with LoadBalanser
 Create Informative ”Wait” pages
 Be prepared : Test the solution before launch
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7. Why Run A Performance Load Test ?
Is the site stable?
When does it crash?
How can I make it faster?
Can my application scale?
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8. Capacity
vs.
Load
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9. Test
Environment
vs.
Production
Environment
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10. Load test 1 to 1
 Load Maximum Throughput
Point of collapse
– How many users can we handle
?
– What is a good result ? Complete
failure
Nr of
users
 Behaviour in the ”Danger
Zone”
– Response time
∞
Does the application become
unstable above load maximum
?
 Problem Analysis Nr of
users
– Where are the bottlenecks
– How to fix them ?
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11. Do you have
Performance Targets?
We shall never crash due to load
We shall be compareble with the best in
class sites for ...
Our peak time response time shall be
better then site www.YYY
 Level : We shall handle100.000 page views
per hour with :
 Better then 4 sec average response time
 95% of our users shall make a selection for
purchase of a (ticket, service etc .. ) in less
then 30 seconds
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12. LoadTest findings
 #1 Identify the Backend Calls
 Database calls don’t kill your application
 Lack of caching does!
 #2 Check Static Content Delivery
 Optimize the cache solution, consider Varnish
 Consider using a CDN, if needed
 #3 Web Infrastructure
 Load Balancer
 Server model
 Bandwidth
 Scaling & Failover
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13. Know your numbers
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14. By the numbers
 The need for a baseline
 My startpage, Login, Book a flight
 Response Time – Average 3.2 sec
 Typical Values – Median 2.5 sec
 Standard Deviation 2.8 sec
 SLA % 99.9
 95 % is better then 11,8 sec
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15. WebPerformance Monitoring for the
Cloud
1 UP/Down 2 Browser 3 Application 4 Correlation
 Basic Monitor  Browser  Analytics  Inside
 Alerting  Scenarios  Trend
monitoring
 Vital Signs
 Up – down  Analytics  Complex
 Basic SLA  Response time
Application  Drill Down
 SLA on  Root cause
applications  Consolidation
with other
system
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17. Tips & Suggestions
 #1 Set Goals
 Uptime
 Performance
 #2 Hate the average
 Work with the exceptions
 Remove the 10 Worst transactions
every month
 #3 Fire drill
 Help identifying problems
 Correlation of data
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18. To sum it up
1 2 3 4
 A load test  Know your  Plan for  Fire Drill
before numbers... the - Be
release … unexpected prepared
...
All systems have a weak spot – what is
yours ?
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19. Excellence in Cloud
Performance
Thank You!

20. Further information
 www.apicasystems.com
– www.apicasystems.com/partners/rightscale.a
spx
 sven.hammar@apicasystem.com
 craig.irwin@apicasystem.com
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