System Performance Engineering Methodology

1. System Performance Engineering
Methodology (SPEM)
by Ankit Rathi
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

2. Agenda
• SPEM Background
• What is SPEM?
• Why SPEM is required?
• Types of SPEM
• How SPEM is implemented?
• Who are SPEM stakeholders?
• Performance Benchmarking Tools
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

3. SPEM Background
• Overnight batch was breaching SLA on regular
basis
• Unable to identify the bottleneck
• Analyzed the whole batch
• Completed critical path analysis
• Identified candidates for tuning
• Based on trail & error
• No structured approach
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

4. What is SPEM?
• Step-by-step framework
• To benchmark the performance
• To identify the current bottlenecks
• To analyze performance trend
• To proactively anticipate performance issues
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

5. Some Basics
• Bottleneck
• Throughput
• Response Time
• Scalability
• Performance Baseline
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

6. Why SPEM is required?
• More & more functionality day by day
• Increasing workload on the systems (more
data, more users)
• Inability to identify root-cause & fix
• No logically structured way to deal with
performance issues
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

7. Performance Baselines
• Application statistics (transaction volumes,
response time)
• Database statistics (DB time, Wait time)
• Operating System statistics (CPU utilization)
• Disk I/O statistics (disk usage, read/write)
• Network statistics (data packets, sockets,
interfaces)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

8. What are the types of SPEM?
• Proactive methodology: analysis, design,
development and test phases
• Reactive methodology: identifying the primary
bottleneck
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

9. How SPEM is implemented?
Proactive Approach
• Simple database & application design
• Instrumenting system performance measures
• Avoiding common oversights in system
architecture
• Caching frequently accessed data
• Workload testing, modeling and
implementation
• Proactive performance stats capture
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

10. How SPEM is implemented?
Reactive Approach
• Get and accurate description of the problem
• Gather application/database/OS/Network stats
• Check for common pitfalls
• Analyze the stats gather, theorize the cause of
the problem
• Propose the remedial actions, then implement
them
• Repeat any steps, as required, until performance
goals are met
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

11. Who are SPEM Stakeholders?
• Business Analysts (gather/analyse
performance requirements)
• System Architects/Designers (design for
performance)
• Developers (code for performance)
• Testers (test for performance)
• Analysts (tune for performance)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

12. Performance Benchmarking Tools
• Tools in Oracle: AWR/Statspack, Explain Plan,
SQL Trace/TKPROF
• Tools in Java: JRockit, JProfiler
• Tools in .NET: PerfView, GlowCode
• Tools for OS: GlowCode (Windows), gProf
(UNIX/Linux)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013