THE DZONE GUIDE TO

PERFORMANCE
& MONITORING
VOLUME III

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DEAR READER,

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Developers face dozens of impedance mismatches every

day. The most fundamental is perhaps the reduction of
the non-sequential (non-procedural program design) to
the sequential (execution). Most software isn't written in
machine code. Most truly step-by-step descriptions of
interesting systems are unusably inefficient.
This is the magic of Church-Turing, that the dimensional
reduction from human-intelligible symbols to machineusable symbols effectively loses nothingthat any
computable function can be computed by a bunch
of steps executed in linear order. But the conceptual
mismatch puts the burden of optimal structure mapping
squarely in the brain of the developer. In my head, I'm
figuring out what InterfaceConsumerInterceptor is like and
what it can do. But javac and the JRE or csc and .NET are
doing...well who knows what. The operating system adds
another layer of well that's not obvious on the face of it,
and again the system architecture, and again the NIC, and
then every packet-forwarder, until what seemed like truly
beautiful code when you wrote it has become...
The epicycles don't end at these higher levels. Modern
processors execute plenty of instructions out of order
even on a single core. Techniques as simple (or is that
disconcerting?) in principle as branch prediction in
practice further fuzzify the developer's sense of what
the computer will actually do with their code. Low-level
caches, pipelining, and other optimizations also make
assumptions about probable execution dependencies,
making even machine code less than fully deterministic.
And then there's the abstraction of the virtual machine...
In short: of course designing for performance is absolutely
essential; but runtime is so crazy a variable that we
can reasonably blame too-early optimization for a nonnegligible chunk of lousy UX and unmaintainable code.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

KEY RESEARCH FINDINGS

EFFECTIVE APM: FIND AND FIX THE THINGS THAT MATTER

BY JON HODGSON

14

KNOW WHEN (AND WHEN NOT) TO BLAME YOUR NETWORK

BY NICK KEPHART

18

MICROSERVICES PERFORMANCE PATTERNS

BY ROHIT DHALL

22

WORKING IN PARALLEL: ON THE COMPLICATIONS OF PARALLEL

ALGORITHM DESIGN BY ALAN HOHN

26

BOTTLENECKS AND LATENCIES: HOW TO KEEP YOUR THREADS BUSY

INFOGRAPHIC

29

LATENCY NUMBERS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW CHECKLIST

BY DEEPAK KARANTH

32

HOW HTTP/2 IS CHANGING WEB PERFORMANCE BEST PRACTICES

BY CLAY SMITH

38

BENCHMARKING JAVA LOGGING FRAMEWORKS

BY ANDRE NEWMAN

42

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS ON PERFORMANCE + MONITORING

BY TOM SMITH

46

WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW YOUR PAGES CONVERSION IMPACT SCORE

BY TAMMY EVERTSS

48

PERFORMANCE + MONITORING SOLUTIONS DIRECTORY

52

DIVING DEEPER INTO PERFORMANCE + MONITORING

53

GLOSSARY

EDITORIAL

BUSINESS
RICK ROSS

JOHN ESPOSITO
RE SE A RCH@DZONE .COM
EDIT OR-IN-CHIEF

CAITLIN CANDELMO
PUBLIC ATIONS M A N AGER

Read it, monitor your results, and let us know what you think.

BY JOHN ESPOSITO
EDIT OR-IN-CHIEF, DZONE

RESE [email protected]

MATT SCHMIDT

PRESIDENT & C T O

JESSE DAVIS

E V P & COO

ANDRE POWELL

KELLET ATKINSON

EDIT ORI A L OPER ATIONS

M A N AGER

V P OF M A RK E TING

G. RYAN SPAIN

MATT OBRIAN

S A L E S@DZONE .COM
DIREC T OR OF BUSINESS
DE V EL OPMENT

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

MATT WERNER
A SSOCI ATE EDIT OR

So our latest Guide to Performance and Monitoring

covers both the static and dynamic, the verifiable and the
unknowable sides of building and maintaining performant
applications.

CEO

MICHAEL THARRINGTON
A SSOCI ATE EDIT OR

TOM SMITH
RESE A RCH A N A LY S T

ALEX CRAFTS

DIRECTOR OF MAJOR ACCOUNTS

CHRIS SMITH

PRODUC TION A DV ISOR

JIM HOWARD

SR ACCOUNT E X ECU TI V E

ANDREW BARKER

ACCOUNT E X ECU TI V E

JIM DWYER

ACCOUNT E X ECU TI V E

CHRIS BRUMFIELD

ACCOUNT M A N AGER

ART
ASHLEY SLATE

DESIGN DIREC T OR

SPECIAL THANKS
to our topic experts, Zone
Leaders, trusted DZone
Most Valuable Bloggers, and
dedicated users for all their
help and feedback in making
this report a great success.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As Tony Hoare notoriously observed, "Premature
optimization is the root of all evil:" that is, the benefits
of absolutely maximal optimization are usually much
lower than the increased cost of maintenance and
debugging that results from the brittleness caused
by that optimization. On the other hand, the natural
tendency of OOP to prioritize form over performance
can generate a codebase that is highly readable but
partitioned such that performance-oriented refactoring
may prove extremely difficult. To help you steer between
the Scylla of overeager optimization and the Charybdis
of runtime-indifferent code structure, we've split
this publication between ways to design performant
systems and ways to monitor performance in the real
world. To shed light on how developers are approaching
application performance, and what performance
problems they encounter (and where, and at what
frequency), we present the following points in summary
of the most important takeaways of our research.

Application code is most likely to cause performance

problems frequently; database performance problems
are most challenging to fix:
DATA Frequent performance issues appear most commonly in
application code (43% of respondents) and in databases second most
commonly (27%). Challenging performance issues are most likely to
appear in the database (51%) and second in application code (47%).
IMPLICATIONS

Enterprise application performance is most likely

to suffer from higher-level, relatively shallow suboptimalities. Deep
understanding of system architecture, network topology, and even pure
algorithm design is not required to address most performance issues.

RECOMMENDATIONS Optimize application code first and databases

second (all other things being equal). On first optimization pass, assume
that performance problems can be addressed without investing in superior
infrastructure. For common performance bottlenecks and key latency
numbers, see our infographic on page 26 and checklist on page 29.

Parallelization is regularly built into program design

by a large minority (but still a minority) of enterprise
developers:
DATA 43% of developers regularly design programs for parallel
execution. Java 8 Parallel Streams are often used (18%), slightly more
frequently than ForkJoin (16%). ExecutorService was most popular

by far, with 47% using it often. Race conditions and thread locks
are encountered monthly by roughly one fifth of developers (21%
and 19% respectively). Of major parallel programming models, only
multithreading is often used by more than 30% of developers (81%).

IMPLICATIONS

Enterprise developers do not manage parallelization

aggressively. Simple thread pool management (ExecutorService) is
much more commonly used for concurrency than upfront work splitting
(ForkJoin), which suggests that optimization for multicore processors
can be improved.

RECOMMENDATIONS

More deliberately model task and data

parallelization, and consider hardware threading more explicitly (and
without relying excessively on synchronization wrappers) when designing
for concurrency. For fundamentals of parallel algorithm design, see
"Working in Parallel: On the Complications of Parallel Algorithm Design"
on page 22 below.

Performance is still a second-stage design

consideration, but not by much:
DATA 56% of developers build application functionality first, then
worry about performance.
IMPLICATIONS

Extremely premature optimization is generally

recognized as poor design, but performance considerations are serious
enough that almost half of developers do think about performance while
building functionality.

RECOMMENDATIONS Distinguish architectural from code-level

performance optimizations. Set clear performance targets (preferably
cascading from UX tolerance levels) and meet them. Optimize for user
value, not for the sake of optimization. For performance optimization of
modern, highly modular architectures, see "Microservices Performance
Patterns" on page 18 below. For performance insights at lower levels, see
"Know When (and When Not) to Blame Your Network" on page 14 below.

Manual firefighting, lack of actionable insights, and

heterogeneous IT environments are the top three monitoring
challenges:
DATA 58% of respondents count firefighting and manual processes
among the top three performance management challenges. 49% count
lack of actionable insights to proactively solve issues. 47% count rising
cost and complexity of managing heterogeneous IT environment.
IMPLICATIONS

Performance management is far from a solved

problem. Monitoring tools and response methods are not providing
insights and solutions effectively, whether because they are not used
adequately or need feature refinement.

RECOMMENDATIONS Measure problem location, frequency, and cost,

and compare with the cost (both monetary and performance overhead)
of an additional management layer. Consider tuning existing monitoring
systems or adopting new systems (e.g. something more proactive than
logs). For monitoring targets and tactics, see "Effective APM: Find and
Fix the Things That Matter" on page 8 below. For the economics of web
performance optimization, see "Why You Need to Know Your Pages
Conversion Impact Score" on page 46 below.

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KEY
RESEARCH
FINDINGS

594 IT professionals responded to DZones 2016

Performance & Monitoring survey

The top three industries in which the survey

takers work are Software Vendors (22%), Finance/
Banking (14%), and E-Commerce/Internet (9%)

The primary roles included Developer Team Leads

(39%) and Development/Engineering roles (36%)

26% work at a company with more than 500

people; 22% work where there are more than
10,000 employees

41% of respondents work at companies whose

headquarters are located in Europe; 32% in the USA

Respondents have years of experience as IT

professionals, with 51% having over 15 years
experience

SOFTWARE AND INFRASTRUCTURE STILL HAVE FREQUENT

PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS When asked about the last time they

Respondents were also asked to note the last time they had to solve
a performance problem in their infrastructure, and the majority
(21%) said in the last three months followed by this month at
17%, and this week at 14%. Compared to 2015s survey results,
where the most respondents (19%) noted over a year ago as the
last time they worked on infrastructure performance problems,
there is a clear shift to having more frequent performance
problems that require immediate attention.

DATABASES POSE A CHALLENGE; FINDING THE ROOT CAUSE

REMAINS AN ISSUE There was another shift this year in the

technology stack that tends to have the hardest-to-fix performance

issues. In 2015, networks (now in 4th in 2016 at 46%) had the most
challenging performance issues to fix, whereas this year 51% of
the respondents noted that database performance issues were the
toughest to fix. The survey takers also listed workload (49%) and
application code (47%) as having hard-to-fix performance issues. In
contrast, 32% of respondents said that failing/old hardware was the
easiest to fix performance challenge, replacing last years easiest
issue to fix: malware.
As applications become more advanced, so do the causes of the
issues. Over half (52%) of the survey takers said that finding the
root cause of an issue remains the most time-consuming part of
fixing a performance-related problem. There does not appear to
be any improvement in optimizing this process, as it was also
the most time-consuming component in 2015s survey. Another
time-consuming aspect includes collecting and interpreting
various metrics (36%). On the other end of the spectrum, the least
time-consuming component of fixing a performance-related issue
remains communication/managing people.
Even though finding the root cause of a problem is the most timeconsuming component of fixing a performance related issue,
the majority (54%) of respondents noted that it takes an average
of less than a week for their team to solve a performance related
problem. These problemsparticularly encountering databaserelated problems such as slow database queries (33%), and too
many database queries (27%)were, on average, encountered on
a monthly basis. On the opposite end, 46% of the respondents said
they rarely remain in the dark about the root cause of an issue.

solved a performance problem in their software, most respondents

(26%) answered that they had done so this week, which was a
similar result compared to 2015s survey. The second most popular
answer this year was in the last 3 months at 23%, followed by in

MONITORING TOOLS AND APPLICATION LOGS ARE KEY As a whole,

respondents said that monitoring tools (32%) discovered the most

01. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU HAD TO SOLVE A PERFORMANCE
PROBLEM IN YOUR SOFTWARE?

02. WHAT IS USUALLY THE MOST TIME CONSUMING PART OF FIXING

A PERFORMANCE ISSUE?

IN THE

NOT SOMEWHAT VERY

1+ YEAR AGO

PAST YEAR

.3% NEVER
IN THE LAST

6 MONTHS

6%

4%

THIS WEEK

26%

9%

IN THE LAST

3 MONTHS

23%

17%
15%

IN THE LAST

THIS MONTH

the last two weeks at 17%. All in all, 81% of respondents answered
in the last 3 months or less, showing that software still has
frequent performance problems that developers need to address.
Application code (43%) remains the area of the technology stack
that tends to have the highest frequency of performance issues,
while malware remains the one with little to no issues, where 61% of
respondents had either very few issues or none at all.

2 WEEKS

COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING

VARIOUS METRICS

9.6%

54.4%

36%

FINDING THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE ISSUE

4%

44.4%

51.5%

FIGURING OUT A SOLUTION TO THE ISSUE

11.3%

67.5%

21.2%

COMMUNICATION/MANAGING PEOPLE
TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE

28.6%

46.5%

24.9%

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APPLICATION PERFORMANCE IS STILL SECONDARY, THOUGH

AWARENESS OF IT IS GROWING The majority of respondents (56%

performance issues. If systems are being monitored and reviewed

consistently, then they tend to catch more performance issues than
any of the other tools. Those who do not rely on monitoring tools
run performance tests to discover performance issues, with 22% of
respondents favoring this. Only 8% of the survey takers credited
dumb luck for discovering performance issues.

though down from 62% in 2015) said that they build their application
functionality first, and then they worry about performance. More
people this year have performance in mind from the start when
building applications, as 41% said that they build performance into the
application from the start, which is up from 35% in 2015.

Much like 2015, this years respondents also favored application logs,
as 89% of them said that these were one of the main tools their teams
use to find the root cause of a performance problem. The second most
commonly used tool for finding the root cause of a performance
issue are database logs, with 68% of respondents relying on them.
Monitoring, logging, and tests are three of the key components used to
help discover problems early enough to fix them before they begin to
negatively affect an applications performance.

When it comes to monitoring tools used within their organizations,

respondents noted that they use many different tools, with 36% using
Nagios, 22% LogStash, and 21% using their own custom/homegrown
tools. Furthermore, organizations are comfortable with the tools they
currently use60% of respondents said that they are not looking
to switch to a new performance monitoring tool within the next 6
months. They also mainly use free and open-source tools, with 56% of
respondents preferring this.

SIMULTANEOUS USER LOADS VARY FOR APPS, FEW SERVERS ARE

USED, AND PARALLEL EXECUTION IS AN AFTERTHOUGHT The

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IS MOVING IN A POSITIVE DIRECTION

Although IT professionals have begun to put more emphasis on

the importance of performance monitoring and testing, there are
still some challenges that they face. The respondents said that
the top challenge in IT infrastructure performance management
(58%) is that the staff is spending too much time in firefighting and
manual processes. The second biggest challenge, at 49%, is the lack
of actionable insights to proactively solve issues. And the third
biggest challenge, with 47% of respondents, was the rising cost and
complexity of managing heterogeneous IT environments. With the
increased and more streamlined use of performance monitoring tools,
these challenges will be minimized.

answers were pretty evenly split amongst the options when the
survey takers were asked what the max simultaneous user load is for
the main application their team works on. The majorityonly 17%
said they use 1,001 5,000; 13% use 101 500; and 12% use 21 100.
When asked how many servers they use at their organizations, 38% of
the respondents said they they use fewer than 20 (this included IaaS
and on-premises servers).
Over half (57%) of the developers surveyed do not regularly design
their programs for parallel execution. When asked which parallel
programming frameworks, standards, and APIs they use, 47% said
they often used Executor Service (Java), while 33% occasionally use
ForkJoin (Java) and 29% occasionally use Web Workers (JavaScript).
As for parallel algorithm design techniques used, 63% most often
use load balancing. 81% of respondents often use multithreading as
their parallel programming model of choice. The respondents noted
that they run into concurrency issues (race conditions, thread locks,
mutual exclusion) only a few times a year.

04. WHAT IS THE MAX SIMULATANEOUS LOAD

FOR THE MAIN APP YOUR TEAM WORKS ON?
0-20

13%

12%

DEBUGGERS

68%
67%
55%
48%
43%
39%

LANGUAGES BUILT-IN TOOLING

11%
501-1,000

1,001-5,000

MEM. DUMP ANALYZERS

THREAD
DUMP
ANALYZERS

17%

5,00110,000

101-500

05. HOW DO YOU PRIORITIZE PERFORMANCE IN YOUR APP DEVELOPMENT

PROCESS?

LACK OF ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS TO PROACTIVELY

SOLVE ISSUES
RISING COST + COMPLEXITY OF MANAGING
HETEROGENEOUS IT ENVIRONMENT

OTHER

3.5%

BUILD PERF.
INTO THE
APP FROM
THE START

41%

56% BUILD APPLICATION

FUNCT. FIRST,
THEN WORRY ABOUT
PERFORMANCE

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RISING COST + COMPLEXITY OF

MANAGING HETEROGENEOUS IT
ENVIRONMENT
LEVERAGING EXISTING
IT MONITORING TOOLS
TO SUPPORT NEWER
APPS + TECH

OTHER

6%

PROFILERS

9%

34%

10,00150,000

21-100

12%

34%

90%

DATABASE LOGS

STAFF SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME IN FIREFIGHTING AND

MANUAL PROCESSES

47%

17%

APPLICATION LOGS

9%

49%

OTHER

06. WHAT ARE YOUR TOP 3 CHALLENGES IN TERMS

OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE PERF. MANAGEMENT

58%

03. WHAT TOOLS DOES YOUR TEAM

COMMONLY USE TO FIND THE ROOT CAUSE
FOR APP PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS?

Another component that can be adding to the abovementioned

challenges is the separation of development and operations.
According to the survey, 61% of respondents said that Dev and
Ops have their metrics gathered in separate siloes. Though this is
still the majority, this is down slightly from 64% in 2015. The more
information is combined and shared amongst teams, the more
streamlined performance management will be.

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One source of truth.

See all your data. Boost performance. Drive accountability for everyone.

IT Operations

Mobile Developers

Faster delivery.
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End-to-end visibility,
24/7 alerting, and
crash analysis.

Front-end Developers
Reduce resolution times
and spend more time
writing new code.

Simple. Powerful. Secure.

Find out why New Relic helps you build and run great software at
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App Owners
Track engagement.
Pinpoint issues.
Optimize usability.

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Reactive vs. Proactive Troubleshooting:

Mastering the Art of Performance
Between all the languages, frameworks, containers, clouds,
and other critical building blocks of todays applications,
figuring out whats causing a bottleneck in performance can
often turn into a time-consumingand often frustrating
task. As long as you know where to look and have the right
kind of visibility, finding and fixing problems doesnt have to
be a painful process.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
When your app is broken or slow, the first thing youre going
to want to know is the impact and severity of the issue. How
many customers has it impacted? And for how long? In order
to rapidly triage and reduce mean time to resolution, look at:
Backend processes: Response times, errors, and transactions are

all essential elements here. You want to quickly pinpoint if it was

your code, backend server, or cloud service that caused an issue.

Frontend code: With more and more code running on the

In an ideal world, you want to avoid being in a reactive

situation. You want to have a sense of confidence when
your application is deployedand the best way to do that is
through pre-launch optimization.
WHEN THINGS COULD GO WRONG
Before any launch, you should proactively monitor the core
metrics above, run test monitors, and set up advanced
composite alerts that have context associated with their
failures. All of this data should be feeding into a single analytics
dashboard that can be used across developers, operations,
and product teams, so theres a shared understanding of
performance across the organization.
This way, whether you find yourself in a reactive or proactive
scenario, youre well-equipped to resolve the issue quickly
and go back to doing what you do best: writing new code, not
troubleshooting it.

client-side, youre going to want to see everything that

happened from the first page load to the final click that
completed a users transaction.

WRITTEN BY TORI WIELDT

DE V EL OPER A DVOC AT E, NE W RELIC

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

New Relic Software Analytics Cloud

BY NEW RELIC

New Relic gives you deep performance analytics for every part of your
software environment.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

APM

Daily

No

Performance monitoring across applications, browsers,

devices, and more

CASE STUDY
One of the fastest-growing digital properties in the U.S., Bleacher Report is
the leading digital destination for team-specific sports content and realtime event coverage. To improve performance, the company embarked
on a multi-year journey to turn its monolithic web application into a
microservices-based architecture. New Relic has been there each step
of the way, helping the Bleacher Report team stay on top of performance
monitoring, proactive load testing, and capacity planning. Not only is the
software analytics tool helping save time and money by making the teams
code more efficient (and in turn, requiring fewer servers), but it also helps
Bleacher Report respond more quickly and effectively to issues reported by
users. I use New Relic every day, says Eddie Dombrowski, senior software
engineer. It helps me find ways to make our applications perform better
and prioritize which areas to address.
BLOG blog.newrelic.com

Customer experience management for web and mobile channels

Proactive root cause analysis anywhere in the stack
Extensible platform offering partner integrations, open APIs,
and 100+ plugins
Secure, multi-tenant SaaS architecture delivering value out
of the box within minutes

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WEBSITE newrelic.com

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QUICK VIEW

Effective APM:
Find and Fix the
Things That Matter
BY JON C. HODGSON

01
Data granularity is critical.
Transaction & metric sampling can
completely miss intermittent issues
and may mislead you into solving
symptoms instead of the root cause.
02
Beware the Flaw of Averages. The
only way to truly understand the
end-user experience of all users is
by capturing all transactions and
leveraging Big Data to analyze them.
03
Methodology is as important as the
data. Ask the wrong questions, or ask
the wrong way, and youll waste time
fixing the wrong things.

APM SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT, RIVERBED TECHNOLOGY

ver the past 20 years as an

application performance
specialist, Ive witnessed APM
evolve dramatically from its roots
in simplistic server monitoring, to
continually adding impressive (but
now ubiquitous) capabilities such
as code instrumentation, multi-tier
transaction tracing, and end-user
experience monitoring. Although the
feature lists of APM tools continue to
grow, organizations continue to have
major performance issues, which
theyre unable to pinpoint and resolve
even after months of effort. In helping
to solve these problems, I noticed
common themes as to why they eluded
detection and resolution for so long.

The quality of the APM data is the number one reason

why performance problems go unsolved. All tools claim to
collect metrics about the environment and trace end-user
transactions, but the way this data is captured, stored, and
displayed ultimately dictates the value that data provides
in detecting the presence of an issue, or accurately
identifying its root cause. Many tools are fundamentally
f lawed in this regard.
The number two reason is the methodology of the
troubleshooter. Even in cases where high-quality data
exists, if you dont ask the right questions or look at that
data the right way, you may not realize the true severity of
an issue, or you may be blind to it altogether. In the worst
cases you may mislead yourself into futilely chasing what I
call a Performance Phantoman issue that appears to be
a root cause, but in actuality is a symptom of a larger issue.
Lets consider a common case that illustrates why these
matter. Businesses want to ensure that their end users
are happy so they can maximize productivity, loyalty,
profits, etc. To that end they will often ask for KPIs to help
them determine if key parts of an application are meeting
SLAs, asking questions like Whats the response t ime of
MyAccount.aspx?
The answer is often provided by an APM tool in a report or
business dashboard with a singular value like:

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A common alternative to the singular value is a time series

chart. Here we see the same data trended for the 4-hour period,
revealing that it was much faster in the beginning and end,
with a worst-case response time in the middle of 25 seconds:
The value above is from a sample dataset I will use for the
remainder of this article. That value represents the average
of 10,000 calls to MyAccount.aspx over a 4-hour period.
Heres a snippet of a log showing those calls:

# Start Time
URL
1 00:00:00.000 MyAccount.aspx
2 00:00:02.413 MyAccount.aspx
3 00:00:04.040 MyAccount.aspx
4 00:00:06.520 MyAccount.aspx
5 00:00:08.028 MyAccount.aspx
6 00:00:10.382 MyAccount.aspx
7 00:00:12.222 MyAccount.aspx
8 00:00:14.074 MyAccount.aspx
9 00:00:15.500 MyAccount.aspx
10 00:00:17.119 MyAccount.aspx

...
9,993 04:02:05.774 MyAccount.aspx
9,994 04:02:07.170 MyAccount.aspx
9,995 04:02:08.433 MyAccount.aspx
9,996 04:02:10.480 MyAccount.aspx
9,997 04:02:12.082 MyAccount.aspx
9,998 04:02:14.869 MyAccount.aspx
9,999 04:02:17.336 MyAccount.aspx

10,000 04:02:19.266 MyAccount.aspx

Time
3.277
3.875
2.825
69.954
35.047
4.194
5.171
4.679
3.795
5.159
3.778
34.376
24.971
4.004
3.552
10.735
3.686
5.200

If you really think about it, youll realize how ludicrous the
initial question was in the first place. A singular value will
never relate the range of experience for all of those users.
There are actually over 10,000 answers to the question:
one for each individual call, and others for subsets of calls
like user type, location, etc. If you really want to know if
ALL of your users are happy with ALL of their interactions
with your application, you have to consider each user
interaction as individually as possible, and beware the Flaw
of Averages.

Although this 1-minute granularity chart has 240x more

information than the singular answer, it still suffers
from the Flaw of Averages. The same data at 15-second
granularity tells a different story:

We see much more volatility in response times, with a worst

case almost double what the previous chart suggested.
As granularity improves, youll get a more realistic
understanding of the experience of your end users. If you
consider that SLAs may be less than a second, youll realize
how inadequate even 15-second granular data is.
Many apps are plagued by periodic saturation of resources
that only last for a second, but cause significant increases in
response time during that second. Heres an example with
five 1-second spikes in a 15-minute period:

In this classic example, a statistician tried to cross a river

that was, on average, 3 feet deep. Unfortunately, since he
could not swim, the maximum value of his life became zero:
An APM tool will only catch the spikes if it coincidentally
samples during the exact seconds the spikes occur in. If your
tool samples every 15 seconds, you might be surprised at how
low the odds are that it will catch those spikes. Statistically
theres a 71% chance it wont see ANY of the spikes, so you
wouldnt even know this behavior was occurring:

SOURCE: The Flaw of Averages: Why We

Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty
by Sam L. Savage, with illustrations used with
permission by Jeff Danziger flawofaverages.com

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Theres a 7% chance it will catch just 1 of the 5 spikes:

For 10,000 transactions you have 10,000 different

answers to the initial question Whats the response t ime of
MyAccount.aspx?this is a much different story than the
simple line charts suggested. But even more importantly,
you have the details as to why each of those 10,000
behaved the way they did:

Heres where your jaw will drop: There is a 1 in 759,375

chance (0.0001%) that it will catch all 5 spikes!

So even at a seemingly good 15-second granularity, theres

almost no chance at all that youd have an accurate
understanding of this behavior. I often see coarse data
granularity as the reason why organizations--even those
with highly rated APM tools--are blind to these sorts of
recurring issues. They dont even know the problem exists,
so they dont even attempt to solve it.
Now lets get back to the previous MyAccounts.aspx example.
I could show you how much better a 1-second sampled
chart tells the story, but even that wouldn't tell the full
story. Other statistics like min/max, percentiles, standard
deviation, and histograms help reveal anomalies, but they
too only paint a partial picture. The best option is to not
sample at all. Capture everything. All transactions, all the
time, down to the method & SQL level. With the right APM
tool this is possible even in production under heavy loads.
But capturing that data is only half the battle, as you
need to store that data in full detail and be able to nimbly
analyze hundreds of thousands of transactions at once.
Your APM tool needs to leverage Big Data to make sense of
all that information and tell the complete story accurately.
Heres our sample dataset as only Big Data can show it:

For each individual transaction you can see what method

or SQL is causing the majority of the delay. You can see
multi-tier maps for each transaction independently, so if
there is a certain pathway thats causing issues, it wont
be hidden by a single one-size-fits-none application map.
You can even get call-tree details for each transaction to
provide the details developers need to solve the issue.
Big Data will allow you to filter out transactions with
particular characteristics, and reveal clusters of behavior
masked by aggregated line charts. By filtering out all the
transactions that didnt contain exceptions, we see that
there are 4 different sub-behaviors of the application:

The top 3 bands of response time are due to timeouts for

3 different dependencies: a Web Service, a Database, and
the Authentication service. The bottom band is due to a
catastrophic failure where the transactions failed before
they even initialized, resulting in ultra-fast response times
which would never be caught by sampling just the slowest
transactions.
Just as there isnt a singular answer to the question Whats
the response t ime? there isnt a singular answer to Why is
it slow?which translates to What are the dif ferent things
we need to fix to improve performance?

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Since Ive been using a sample dataset, I want to prove that

this concept isnt just academic. Here are some real-world
examples where Big Data revealed patterns of behavior
that were previously hidden by other tools:

The horizontal lines represent timeouts. The vertical

lines are microbursts after stalls. The diagonal lines are
client or server side queuing depending on the direction.
The ramps-beneath-ramps are compound issues. You will
NEVER see patterns like these in line charts. If youve
never seen patterns like these, then youve never seen an
accurate representation of your data.
As I mentioned earlier, even with the best data, if you ask
the wrong questions youll get the wrong answer. Its very
common for troubleshooters to ask Why are the slowest
transact ions slow? but quite often this isnt the reason
why the application is slow overall. In our sample dataset,
Big Data reveals that there isnt a consistent reason for
slowness across the slowest transactions:

This is a clear indication of the Performance Phantoms

I referred to earlier, where some environmental issue like
garbage collection or hypervisor over-commitment causes
delays in whatever pieces of code happen to be running
at the same time. Trying to optimize these methods will
waste countless hours with little reward. You can never
solve a root cause by trying to fix the symptom.
The best way to make overarching improvements
to application performance is to leverage Big Data to

11

identify the overarching reasons for delay. Here we see a

consistent reason for delay in this subset of transactions:

Method C is the overall largest contributor to delays,

and individual transactions confirm that consistent
root cause. Focusing on this one method will yield the
greatest benefit for the least effort.
I worked with a large bank who had a major
performance issue in one of their key pages. Using
legacy APM tools, they identified the slowest methods
in the slowest transactions, but even after optimizing
them, performance issues persisted. They repeated this
process for months to no avail. Once they leveraged Big
Data APM, in one day they were able to identify a little
method that on average took 53ms, but ran so frequently
it wound up being the largest contributor to delay.
Optimizing that single method improved the response
time of 7 Million transactions per day by 95%, and
reduced total processing time by 2,000 hours per day.
This is not a corner case. Issues of this magnitude are
very commonand hidden in plain sightbut with the
right data and methodology they are easily revealed.
I challenge you to scrutinize your current tools to make
sure theyre capturing the right data in the right way. If
your data is blind to an issue, or misrepresents it, then
youll fail before you even begin. Once you have the right
data, I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone
of just looking at averages and line charts, and harness
the power that Big Data provides. Sift through the noise,
identify the patterns in your behavior, and learn to
distinguish inconsistent symptoms from consistent root
causes. Be the hero that identifies the one little thing
that yields hours of improvement for millions of users.
J O N C. H O D G S O N is an APM subject matter expert for
Riverbed Technology who has helped hundreds of organizations
around the world optimize the reliability and performance of
their mission-critical applications. When hes not obsessing
about how to make things perform faster, he enjoys digging
things up with his tractor at his home in Missouri.

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IT is about decisions
BMC TrueSight transforms IT by turning data into actionable insights while
eliminating the noise of traditional IT management tools
Bring IT to Life with TrueSight

Unprecedented Visibility - Noise = Actionable Insight

TrueSight performance and analytics

12

bmc.com/truesight

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2016 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

SPONSORED OPINION

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The New School of Applications

and Infrastructure
The evolution of the performance and analytics space for IT
operations has taken some really interesting turns over the last
12 months. As the enterprise begins to adopt modern, elastic
technologies and practices, the traditional stack that weve all
been tasked with supporting has changed. With that change comes
a necessary evolution in both the tooling and the methodology of
dealing with these new mutable environments. Big Data, Cloud,
DevOps, web-scale, cloud-scale these are no longer just buzz
words bandied about by the analyst community and employed by
nimble little startups. They are being adopted, in production, into
many of BMCs largest customers.
Perhaps the most important consequence brought on by these new
trends in IT is application centricity. The bottom line of every truly
digital enterprise is customer experience. Whether its B2B or B2C,
the way in which the end-user interacts with the business service
is the ultimate measure of success or failure for the business. To
support this customer oriented stance, the once disparate IT Ops,
application and development teams are beginning to overlap. They
require the ability to access both deep and wide views of the new,
modern stack. This is why its so critical to provide end-to-end insight
into both the application and the infrastructure that supports it.

The challenge in addressing both APM and infrastructure

monitoring needs in one solution for the increasingly complex
modern stack is noise. The more complex and fluid applications
and infrastructure become, the louder they get.
So how do you parse out the signal from the noise?
At BMC weve long been known as a MoM (manager of
managers) in the IT operations space. We collect, correlate
and alert on everything thats gone awry in your infrastructure.
This is still true but weve evolved the concept to support the
complexity and variety of the modern stack. Weve added APM
insight into the equation and tied infrastructure and applications
together with Operational Analytics in the TrueSight portfolio.
This ensures you see the right problems in the context of the
applications and underlying infrastructure components that are
affected without the distraction of false or symptomatic alerts.

WRITTEN BY MARK RIVINGTON

SENIOR DIREC T OR OF S T R AT EGY, BMC TRUESIGHT

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

TrueSight Performance and Analytics

BY BMC SOFTWARE

BMC TrueSight applies behavioral analytics to a converged view of applications

and infrastructure for less noise and more insights
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

Application and
Infrastructure Monitoring

Continuous Delivery

Some components

Monitor performance of applications and infrastructure together

Dynamically view application topology
Reduce event noise with operational IT analytics

CASE STUDY

Northwestern University Information Technology (NUIT) delivers

computing services to nearly 25,000 students, faculty and staff
across three campuses in Illinois including over 300+ application
owners with 99% system uptime. NUIT uses TrueSight App Visibility
Manager to power a web-based capacity and availability service
monitoring dashboard that keeps IT teams informed of potential
performance problems and enable thousands of university end-users
to check the status of their web applications. Putting the right data
in the hands of the operations team and application owners has
saved hours of staff time and improved collaboration on issues.
BLOG bmc.com/opsblog

13

Get proactive with log analytics and root cause analysis

Understand the service impact of events
Prioritize and route incidents automatically
Automate event remediation and self-healing
Real-time monitoring of modern stack

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
SEI
Northwestern Univ.

Socit Gnrale

InContact
Harmony Information Lockheed Martin

HealthMEDX
IKEA

Systems

TWITTER @truesightpulse

WEBSITE bmc.com/truesight

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Know When
(and When Not)
to Blame Your
Network
BY NICK KEPHART

QUICK VIEW
01
In distributed, cloud-based
environments, its equally important
to understand both application and
network performance.
02
Active monitoring, often used for
website performance, can also
provide you with insights into cloud
provider networks.
03
Active monitoring can provide you a
stack trace for your network, showing
the performance of each network that
your traffic traverses.
04
Consider adding key network
connectivity and service metrics to
your arsenal in order to get ahead of
cloud outages.

SR. DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING, THOUSANDEYES

ost of us are familiar with APM tools.

They are broadly deployed; a recent
Gartner survey showed APM being used
to monitor more than 25% of applications
in 40% of enterprises. APM instruments
our code to make it easier to troubleshoot
application-related issues. You can trace
transactions, check SQL performance, and
track error rates. But sometimes your users
complain about performance and your APM
shows everything is swell. Thats when its
typically time to push the ticket over to the
network team.
And not only is it the case that APM tools tend to be pretty opaque
as to whether the network is at fault, but they also arent always
well suited for the type of end-user and cloud environments that
you are increasingly seeing. The same Gartner survey also found
that a majority of APM users believe that current APM solutions are
challenged by the prevalence of cloud-hosted applications and the
Internet of Things (IoT).
So in this more distributed environment, where its already difficult
to pull apart whether a performance issue is application or network
related, what do you do? The reality is that some of the same techniques

14

you likely already use to monitor application experience can also help
with network experience. Getting better visibility into application
delivery may not be as hard as it seems.

SEEING APPLICATION AND NETWORK AS ONE

Active (or synthetic) monitoring is most associated with understanding
page load and user transaction timings. But it can also help you
understand when an issue is network-related, and when it isnt, so you
can be confident when assigning your team to look into a problem.
Active monitoring can give you insight into the performance of
networks and infrastructure, as well as your application. And, in
addition to your data center, it works in cloud environments and
across the Internet, where many of your applications are hosted and
where your customers are clicking away on your app. That way, you
can see network and application data lined up right next to each
other; and not just some average latencies, but in-depth information
about how each portion of the network, between your app and your
users, is performing. Most active monitoring tools will give you
perspectives both from Internet locations and from within your own
infrastructure, so you can use this technique for customer-facing or
internal-facing applications.

HOW IT WORKS
So how does it work? It starts with loading a page in a browser
and monitoring user timing. Each object on the page is loaded,
measuring load time (DNS, blocked, wait, response, etc.) wire size, and
uncompressed size. These page loads can be linked together as entire
user transactions with button clicks, form fills, and more. This can be
particularly useful for JavaScript-heavy pages where user interactions

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trigger additional network requests and object loads. Active

monitoring can collect much of the same data you get in Firefox or
Chrome developer tools en masseat large scaleand crunch all of
the results into easy-to-digest views.

Object Errors and Load Time: Most apps and webpages have

objects coming from a variety of third-party locations and

CDNs. Understand whether availability of one object is causing
part of your app to fail.

In addition to all of this browser-level information, active monitoring

can also send packets across the network that are specifically
instrumented to give you a clear understanding of performance. By
synchronizing it with browser-level data, you can get a ton of useful
data about how your app is being accessed, not just loaded.

Web/App Server Availability and Response Time: Most likely a

A STACK TRACE FOR YOUR NETWORK CONNECTIVITY

NETWORK CONNECTIVITY

This isnt just round-trip loss and latency measurements to the

web server. You can measure loss and latency to each layer 3 hop
between your users and your web server or CDN edge. Plus, you can
measure both the forward and reverse path, so you can understand
performance of both downloads and uploads between your app and
users. Thats huge!
Why? Well, within your app you can solve problems a lot faster when
you have an exact stack trace, right? Its the same with the network.
By knowing which points in the network are having issues, you can
much more quickly triage the issue and even tell whos responsible.
All of a sudden you can answer questions such as:
Is your cloud provider or hosted data center proving the

throughput you expect?

metric youre already tracking, but a key one to correlate with

network connectivity metrics to understand outages.

Loss per Interface: By tracking loss per interface, you can

easily correlate network connectivity issues with specific

service providers and devices.
Latency per Link: With a link-level view, you can understand

which portion of your CDN, ISP, or data center networks are

congested or faulty.
Throughput per Location: Understanding throughput by ISP,

region, and city can inform decisions about how fast bulky
objects can be loaded by users.

NETWORK SERVICES
CDN Latency: Measure performance from users to edge

locations as well as your origin to CDN ingestion servers.

DNS Availability and Response Time: It doesnt go wrong

Is your IaaS provider having an outage, either regionally or more

widespread?
Is your CDN correctly caching and serving your content from an

optimal edge location?

Is your DNS service efficiently serving up DNS queries to

your users?

often, but when it does, youre hosed. Keep an eye on your DNS
service provider.
Routing Path Changes: Keeping a pulse on routing changes

can ensure that you know if there is network instability or

suboptimal routing.

ADDING ACTIVE MONITORING TO YOUR ARSENAL

As any DevOps Engineer knows, a lot can go wrong in a lot of

places and exhibit strange behavior. For example, traffic between
countries in Asia often peers in the United States or Singapore given
the congested links with China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The
same thing happens in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
Adjusting routing or other network configurations can dramatically
speed up app delivery in these cases.
Having the equivalent of a stack trace for your network will make it
possible to detect issues you may not know exist and to fix problems
fast as they arise.

KEY APPLICATION DELIVERY METRICS

So what will you do with this sort of data? First, you can start
collecting key metrics about the delivery of your application that you
may not currently have at your disposal. Here are some of the most
important metrics to keep an eye on:

APP PERFORMANCE
Page Load and Transaction Time: A standard metric in many

APM tools, this can provide a good performance baseline.

Object Size (wire and uncompressed): The size of objects on the

15

wire can vary widely and is important to your apps sensitivity

to throughput constraints.

Active monitoring can save you from huge headaches. One major
payment processor that Ive worked with spent an entire holiday
weekend, with multiple senior engineers trying to track down what
they thought was a database transaction fault. Another team had just
started deploying active monitoring in their environment, and upon
reviewing the data, was able to track the problem to a routing issue
that was causing unstable network connectivity. Upon seeing the
data, the application development team became instant converts to
adding active monitoring into the runbook for issue resolution.
As your applications are increasingly relying on IaaS, microservices,
and APIs from far-f lung parts of the Internet, your app is more reliant
on the network than ever. That means in order to have a complete
view of application experience, you should be adding active network
monitoring to your application troubleshooting arsenal. With this
data, your development team can avoid dead ends and be more
confident the next time you need to ask the network guys to dive into
an issue.
N I C K K E P H A RT leads Product Marketing at ThousandEyes, which
develops Network Intelligence software, where he reports on Internet
health and digs into the causes of outages that impact important online
services. Prior to ThousandEyes, Nick worked to promote new approaches
to cloud application architectures and automation while at cloud
management firm RightScale.

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Deliver Great App Performance

with AutoPilot Insight

Performance Monitoring
+
Powerful Analytics
=
Satisfied Customers

16

3 Analyze logs, metrics, users,

and perform total end-to-end
transaction tracking
3 Isolate and diagnose problems
before they affect customers
3 Integrate all infrastructure and
performance monitoring on a
single pane of glass
3 Reduce support costs
Begin your free product trial
and business analysis today at
www.nastel.com/nastelzone

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SPONSORED OPINION

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The ABCs of Performance Monitoring

YOUR WORLD IS COMPLICATED
IT environments are much the same as they were 20+ years ago
except for everything. Along with OS, networks, middleware and
business apps, todays IT pros must grasp the complexity of Big
Data, Web- and cloud-based technology, mobile apps, business
processes, and whatever is coming out next week. And now it all
needs to be in real-time along with sophisticated analytics.

ASSUME YOUR DELOREAN IS PERMANENTLY IN THE SHOP

Forget about going back in a DeLorean to an earlier, simpler time.
Concentrate on what you can do now to make your IT environments
more understandable, controllableand ultimately, more reliable.
Start by:
Determining the probable root causes of IT problems before
they affect business service delivery
Analyzing all of your related performance and infrastructure
monitoring data together

Application performance monitoring (APM) focuses on

understanding the health and throughput of apps within one or
more system environments, from simple to the most complex
enterprise settings. To paraphrase research compiled by Gartner
over the last six years, there are five facets, or dimensions,
of APM: Application topology discovery, Transaction profiling,
Application component deep dive, IT operations analytics (ITOA),
and End-user experience monitoring (EUEM).
Real-time visibility on application performance not only lets IT
pros know how well their business services are performing at any
given moment, but also provides the foundation for continuous
optimization. If you pick the right tools youll be able to focus on
the right issues, at the right times. And being able to zero in with
speed and precision as problems arise means bottlenecks are
eliminated quickly and your companys reputation with app users
is protected, which is the ultimate name of the game for APM.
Click here to see the rest of the article.

Understanding business transaction flows, the lifeblood of

any business

WRITTEN BY CHARLEY RICH

V P-PRODUC T M A N AGEMEN T, NASTEL TECHNOLOGIES

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

AutoPilot Insight

BY NASTEL TECHNOLOGIES

Nastel Technologies provides a unified suite of analytic and monitoring tools for
end-to-end transaction tracking, logs, end-users, and apps
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

Analytics & APM

Every quarter

No

Unified control of APM, Analytics, and Messaging

Middleware/Admin functions

CASE STUDY
Sky Mexico, a satellite television delivery service, needed a product to span its
UNIX and Windows infrastructure and monitor the health of ERP, CRM, billing, IVR,
provisioning, and other business and IT transactions. The lack of which was causing:

Increasing backlog of service requests

Failure to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Transaction, log, application flow, and end-user analysis, plus

business process mapping
Auto-discovery of apps, system components, transaction
flow, and app dependencies

Loss or delay in order fulfillment

On-going damage to company reputation and competitive stance
With AutoPilot Insight, Sky:

Achieved a reduction of help desk tickets and costly Tier 3 support of 30 and
70 percent, respectively

Root-cause analysis; drilldown to offending components, SQL

queries, and method calls

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
CitiBank

BestBuy

Fiserve

Could answer critical questions like: Whats my order status?

BNY Mellon

UnitedHealth Group

Sky

Turned an IT team from reactive to proactive

Dell

NY Power Authority

Slashed MTTR by 45 percent via advanced complex event processing (CEP)

BLOG www.nastel.com/blog

17

Advanced Complex Event Processing engine enables

elimination of false problem alarms

TWITTER @nastel

WEBSITE www.nastel.com

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Performance
Patterns in
MicroservicesBased Integrations
BY ROHIT DHALL

QUICK VIEW
01
Understand how integration with
multiple systems poses potential
performance issues.
02
Learn what performance patterns
are and how these can help
you avoid common potential
performance issues.
03
Understand five different performance patterns and how they work.
04
Understand the importance of
asynchronous communication/
integration.

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT, ENGINEERING AND R&D SERVICES, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

ystems based on microservices architectures

are becoming more and more popular in IT
environments. The rise of microservices increases
the challenges associated with systems with
multiple integrations. Almost all applications that
perform anything useful for a given business need
to be integrated with one or more applications. With
microservices-based architecture, where a number
of services are broken down based on the services
or functionality offered, the number of integration
points or touch points also increases massively.
This can impact the system as a whole, since now
overall system performance is also dependent upon
external factors (the performance of an external
system and its behavior).

PERFORMANCE PATTERNS AND THEIR BENEFITS

The concept of Design Patterns are well documented and
understood in the software development world. These design
patterns generally describe a reusable solution to a commonly
occurring problem. Using design patterns can ensure good
architectural design, but these alone are not enough to address
performance challenges.

This is where performance patterns come into play. When

implemented correctly, these can really help build a scalable solution.

PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES WITH RESPECT TO

INTEGRATED SYSTEMS

Distributed computing has its own challenges, and all of these

challenges are not only well documented, but are experienced by
professionals working on distributed systems almost daily. While

18

connecting to other microservices (within the same bounded

context or of some remote, external system), many things can go
wrong. Services and systems (both internal and external) you
connect to may be slow or down. If your application is not designed
to handle this scenario gracefully, it can have an adverse impact on
the performance and stability of the overall application.

PERFORMANCE PATTERNS

In this section we will talk about some approaches and design

decisions that can help us achieve better performance, resilience,
and overall stability with respect to integration challenges in a
microservices-based environment.

THROTTLING

Throttling is one technique that can be used to prevent any

misbehaving or rogue application from overloading or bringing
down our application by sending more requests than what our
application can handle.
One simple way to implement throttling is by providing a fixed
number of connections to individual applications. For example,
there are two vendors who call our microservice to deduct money
from one account. If one vendor has a big application (like Amazon),
then it is likely to consume our service more often than a vendor
which has a small user base. We can provide these two vendors
two separate and dedicated entry points, with dedicated throttled
connection limits. This way, a large number of requests coming
from Amazon will not hamper requests coming from a second
vendor. Moreover, we can throttle individual partners so that none
can send requests at a rate faster than what we can process.
Generally, synchronous requests from external services/systems
are throttled at the load balancer/HTTP server or another such
entry point.

TIMEOUTS

If a microservice is responding slowly, it can cause our application

to take longer to complete a request. Application threads now
remain busy for a longer duration. This can have a cascading

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impact on our application, resulting in the application/server

becoming totally choked/unresponsive.
Most libraries, APIs, frameworks, and servers provide
configurable settings for different kinds of timeouts. You may
need to set timeouts for read requests, write requests, wait
timeouts, connection pool wait timeouts, keep alive timeouts,
and so on. Values of these timeouts should be determined only by
proper performance testing, SLA validation, etc.

DEDICATED THREAD POOLS/BULKHEADS

Consider a scenario where, in your application f low, you need to

connect to five different microservices using REST over HTTP.
You are also using a library to use a common thread pool for
maintaining these connections. If, for some reason, one of the five
services starts responding slowly, then all your pool members
will be exhausted waiting for the response from this service.
To minimize the impact, it is always a good practice to have a
dedicated pool for each individual service. This can minimize
the impact caused by a misbehaving service, allowing your
application to continue with other parts of the execution path.
This is commonly known as the bulkheads pattern. The following
figure depicts a sample scenario of implementing a bulkhead. On
the left side of the figure, microservice Awhich is calling both
microservice X and microservice Yis using a single common
pool to connect to these microservices. If either service X or
service Y misbehaves, it could impact the overall behavior of
the f low, since the connection pool is common. If a bulkhead is
implemented instead (as shown in the right side of the figure),
even if microservice X is misbehaving, only the pool for X will
be impacted. The application can continue to offer functionality
that depends on microservice Y.

MICROSERVICE A

MICROSERVICE Y

POOL FOR X

POOL FOR Y

MICROSERVICE X

MICROSERVICE Y

FIGURE 1: COMMON THREAD POOL VS. BULKHEADS

HOW BULKHEADS WORK

INITIALIZE CONNECTION POOL

WAIT FOR PREDEFINED TIME

IS CONNECTION AVAILABLE NOW

RECEIVE CONNECTION REQUEST

IS CONNECTION AVAILABLE

CONNECTION NOT AVAILABLE

YES

DECREASE NUMBER OF
AVAILABLE CONNECTION

RETURN CONNECTION

STILL NOT AVAILABLE

AVAILABLE

RETURN
EXCEPTION

FIGURE 2: COMMON THREAD POOL VS. BULKHEADS

Critical Details
Any application that needs to connect to a component will
request a connection to that component.

Connection to each of the components is controlled by the

individual bulkhead.
When a request for a new connection is made, the bulkhead
will check if the connection to the requested component is
available to serve the request.
If the connection is available, it will allocate this connection to
serve the request.

19

CIRCUIT BREAKERS

A Circuit Breaker is a design pattern, which is used to minimize

the impact of any of the downstream being not accessible or
down (due to planned or unplanned outages). Circuit breakers are
used to check the availability of external systems/services, and in
case these are down, applications can be prevented from sending
requests to these external systems. This acts as a safety measure,
on top of timeouts/bulkheads, where one may not want to even
wait for the period specified by timeout. If a downstream system
is down, it is of no use to wait for the TIMEOUT period for each
request, and then getting a response of timeout exception.
Circuit breakers can have built in logic to perform necessary
health checks of external systems.

ASYNCHRONOUS INTEGRATION

Most performance issues related to integrations can be avoided

by decoupling the communications between microservices.
The asynchronous integration approach provides one such
mechanism to achieve this decoupling. Take a look at the design
of your microservices-based system, and give it a serious thought
if you see point-to-point integration between two microservices.
Any standard message broker system can be used to provide
publish-subscribe capabilities. Another way to achieve
asynchronous integration is to use event-driven architecure.
The following figure shows a scenario, where decoupling between
producers and receivers/subscribers is achieved with the use of a
message broker.

SUBSCRIBER

SUBSCRIBER

RECEIVE EVENT DATA

RECEIVE EVENT DATA

MESSAGE BROKER
PUBLISH EVENT DATA

PUBLISH EVENT DATA

PUBLISHER

PUBLISHER

CONCLUSION

BULKHEAD

REQUEST FOR
A CONNECTION

If any connection becomes available during this wait period, it

will be allocated to serve the waiting request.

MICROSERVICE A

CONNECTION POOL FOR X AND Y

MICROSERVICE X

In case no free connection is available, the bulkhead will wait

for a pre-defined time interval.

In this article, we talked about some of the performance

challenges we face while integrating microservices-based
systems. It also presented some patterns that can be used to avoid
these performance issues. We discussed throttling, timeout,
bulkheads and circuit breaker patterns. Apart from these, an
asynchronous integration approach is also discussed.
In a nutshell, asynchronous integration should be preferred,
wherever possible. Other patterns can also be used in integration
scenarios to avoid the ripple/cascading side effect of a
misbehaving downstream system.
R O H I T D H A L L is working as an Enterprise Architect with the Engineering
and R&D Services division of HCL Technologies. He has more than 19 years
of experience. He helps global clients build technical solutions to solve
their complex business problems. His main area of expertise is architecting,
designing, and implementing high-performance, fault-tolerant, and highly
available solutions for leading Telco and BFSI organizations. He has worked
with diverse technologies like Java/J2EE, client-server, P2P, DWH, SOA,
Big Data, IoT, etc. He regularly writes white papers, articles and blogs and
for various IT events, forums, and portals. He is also a coauthor of the IBM
Redbook and Redpaper on ITCAM for WebSphere.

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See Your Users as People

Not Numbers
Manage and Maximize their experience with CA Application
Performance Management
Behind the pretty face of todays applications can be a complex array of
microservices, containers, APIs and back-end services. You need more
than just data to deliver exceptional user experience. CA Application
Performance Management provides the analytics and insights you
need to truly understand and manage user experience and make your
customers happy.

www.ca.com/apm

20

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SPONSORED OPINION

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Five Tips to Successfully Manage User Experience

with Application Performance Management
When implementing an application performance monitoring
strategy it can be tempting to just grab some tools and start using
them. This can ultimately lead to choosing one or more disparate
tools that are not integrated or holistic in their approach. Too
many tools and too much data can actually lead to not enough
insight into what is really going on with your apps or your users
experience. Here are five tips for success.
First, understand all of your customers. Monitor apps across
mobile, web and wearables and include synthetic monitoring to find
and fix problems even at times where you have no users. Leverage
passive monitoring when security or other concerns prohibit direct
end-user monitoring.
Second, make sure you can follow transactions from front-end to
back-end. Transactions can cover a lot of ground from your app to
APIs, security layers, middleware all the way to the back-end. Make
sure your monitoring covers the same ground.
Third, get continuous feedback across DevOps by integrating
monitoring across all parts of the SDLC. This is as much cultural
as it is technical. Collaboration across Dev and Ops is critical to
delivering great user experiences.

Fourth, understand how changes impact performance. Being able

to roll back time to see what changed before an issue helps you
find patient zero and resolve problems faster.

TOO MANY TOOLS AND TOO MUCH DATA CAN ACTUALLY

LEAD TO NOT ENOUGH INSIGHT INTO WHAT IS REALLY
GOING ON WITH YOUR APPS
Finally, simplify the complex! Modern apps can have a lot going
on under the covers. Views and perspectives that remove layers of
complexity help you see what is important more clearly, without a
distracting data deluge.
Consider these tips and youll be more successful in managing
the performance of your applications - and help keep your
customers happy.

WRITTEN BY DAVID HARDMAN

DIREC T OR, PRODUC T M A RK E T ING, CA TECHNOLOGIES

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

CA Application Performance Management

BY CA TECHNOLOGIES

CA APM speeds and simplifies the triage of application performance issues,

helping you deliver loyalty-building user experiences
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

APM

Quarterly

No

EasySimplify the triage process through role based views and

integrated timeline

CASE STUDY

Orange has been offering communication services for more than 20

years. Today it provides mobile and landline telecommunications and
broadband services to 244 million retail and business customers
around the globe. An excellent customer experience is a strategic
priority for Orange. But the performance of some applications on
Orange.com was not up to par. CA APM plays a critical role in
ensuring the overall quality of Oranges applications. It helps Orange
assess the risk associated with an application prior to its release
into a given environment. Orange can deliver the excellent online
experience expected by todays increasingly connected customers
with better reliability, availability and faster response times.
BLOG bit.ly/ca-apm

21

TWITTER @cainc

ProactiveRecognize problems as they develop and focus on

the most critical issues
IntelligentDetect and monitor application processes and
transactions automatically
CollaborativeEnable better communication between Dev and
Ops to resolve problems faster

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
Lexmark

Innovapost

Vodafone

Blue Cross
Blue Shield of
Tennessee

Itau Unibanco

U.S. Cellular

Expeditors

Produban

WEBSITE ca.com/apm

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Working in
Parallel:

QUICK VIEW
01
In parallel programming, work
is all the steps you have to do,
and depth is how much work
you can do at once. Both use Big
O notation.

ON THE COMPLICATIONS OF
PARALLEL ALGORITHM DESIGN

03
Sometimes you have to waste work
to improve parallelism.
04
Sometimes the algorithm with the
best available parallelism is not
the best algorithm.

BY ALAN HOHN
SOFTWARE ARCHITECT, LOCKHEED MARTIN MISSION SYSTEMS AND TRAINING

oving from a sequential to

a parallel implementation
of an algorithm usually means
that something changes, and
it may mean a completely
different approach.
SIMPLE PERFORMANCE
We talk about functions in terms of the order (typically
called Big O). This is how it behaves as the input size
changes, without worrying too much about specifics of how
long it takes to actually do the work.
For example, if we have data stored in an unsorted list
structure, and we need to find out if a particular value is
in the list, we must check each item in the list until we
find the item or reach the end. In Big O notation we call
thisO(n), indicating that as the lengthnof the list grows,
we should expect the time it takes to search it to increase in
a linear way.
Note that we dont care how long it takes to step through
and look at each element, and we dont care that an

22

02
Available parallelism is work
divided by depth.

05
After you find a good parallel
algorithm, the next challenge is
tuning it to run efficiently on real
hardware.

early match is very fast. We only care about the general

relationship between the size of the list and the time it
takes to run. In this case, if the list gets twice as long, the
average run time will get about twice as long.
Similarly, if we had an unsorted list, and we were searching
for duplicated elements, we would call thisO(n^2), because
we are going to have to donsearches through the list, each
of which we already said isO(n). Regular math works here,
andO(n)timesO(n)equalsO(n^2). Again, the details dont
matter; we just care that if the list gets three times as long,
average run time will be about nine times as long.

WORK AND DEPTH

When we move from sequential to parallel, we still think
about Big O, but also about doing multiple things at the
same time. For example, in searching an unordered list,
while we have to step through the whole list, every single
comparison is independent of every other, so if we had that
many processors we could do them all at once.
As a result, instead of having a single Big O value, we use
the terms "work" and "depth." Work we saw earlier; it is how
the run time grows as the input size grows. Depth also uses
Big O notation, but it uses it to express how easy it is to run
in parallel.
We use the term "depth" because we are thinking in terms
of "divide and conquer." We expect to have a recursive

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function that hands off smaller and smaller pieces of the

problem to new versions of itself. The f latter (shallower)
the recursion, the better, because it means we can spread
out across multiple processes more easily. In our search of
an unordered list, the depth isO(1), or "constant time." No
matter how many extra items there are in the list, we can,
in theory, break it up into that number of pieces.
In our unsorted list duplicate search, we compare each
item in the list with every other item. This is no problem,
for we just createn^2separate tasks, each with a different
"left" and "right" index for the comparison, and we can do
all the comparisons in one step. So the depth is stillO(1).
At this point, alarm bells will be ringing about how
feasible this is, but I'm not quite ready to let the real world
intrude yet.

AVAILABLE PARALLELISM
Putting work and depth together, we can define "available
parallelism" (where bigger is better):
Available Parallelism = Work / Depth
With our search through an unsorted list, the work
wasO(n)and the depth wasO(1), giving an available
parallelism ofO(n). This means that as the size of the
input increases, the amount of work increases linearly, but
our ability to do it in parallel also increases linearly. So
as long as we have more processors the problem will take
about the same amount of time (ignoring for a moment the
overhead of splitting the work).
In a marginally more realistic example, let's say that
instead of just identifying duplicates, we wanted to count
the number of duplicates for each duplicate we find. Now,
instead of just comparing each item in the list to every
other item, we also need to keep track of how many
matches we've found. So we can't split up the comparisons
completely. Let's take a simple approach. We will split up
the "left" side of the comparison, then just iterate over the
list. This way we count the number of matches in parallel
for each item in the list. Of course, this is a very poor
approach, because we are finding the same duplicates
many times, which is a lot of wasted work.
For this example, while the work is stillO(n^2), the depth
is nowO(n). This means our available parallelism isO(n).
This is still quite good, because we still see linear speedup
from adding more processors.
Of course, it would be nice to avoid that wasted work.
Those experienced with map and reduce may have
noticed that a map can emit a value for each item, then
a reducer can add them up. In fact, this is Hadoops
WordCount example. The work in this case isO(n), and
if the reducer is written correctly the depth isO(log n).

23

Our available parallelism is O(n / log n), which is

slightly less than linear.
Note that while the work is much worse in the first
example, because of all the wasted comparisons, it has
slightly better available parallelism than the map/reduce
example, because it fully preserves the independence of
all the comparisons. That is not enough reason to choose
it, but it does illustrate an important rule in parallel
programming, which is that sometimes it is necessary to
waste work in order to improve parallelism.

THE REAL WORLD WILL NOT STOP HASSLING ME

So far, making a good parallel algorithm has meant trying
to increase our available parallelism, because then we can
just throw more hardware at the problem to get it to run
faster. Unfortunately, while that can be true, it isn't the
full story.
First, servers and electricity cost money. There is some
limit on buying more hardware or spawning more cloud
instances. At that point, no matter what the theoretical
speedup of our algorithm is, we won't see any actual
advantages, because we'll just be queuing up more tasks
than we have cores to run them on.
Second, Big O notation hides a lot of important differences
between algorithms. There's a cost in creating a thread
or even aGoroutine. In most real-world implementations,
tuning means we spawn many fewer parallel tasks than
the theoretical maximum. For example, Hadoop lets you
carefully configuresplit size(amount of data given to each
worker) andblock size (amount of data stored separately
on disk). Our duplicate search with n^2tasks was absurd;
the overhead is going to be many times greater than the
time it takes to do a single comparison of two items.
Third, as we saw above, to get higher available parallelism
we sometimes have to do extra work, not just incur extra
overhead. Sometimes that extra work is justified by the
speedup we get; sometimes it is not.

CONCLUSION
This is a pretty basic discussion of how parallel
algorithms are analyzed and compared to each other. If
you'd like to see how parallel code might work in practice,
I have a GitHub repository that runs a Net Present Value
simulator using Java fork/joins RecursiveTask that
might be of interest.
A L A N H O H N is a software architect with Lockheed Martin Mission
Systems and Training. Much of his recent work has been with Java,
especially Java EE (JBoss) and OSGi (Karaf), but hes worked with C,
C++, C#, Ada, Python, MATLAB, Hadoop, and a few other things over
time. He had a great professor at Georgia Tech for a high performance
computing class, which is lucky because he stumbled into using it at
work soon after.

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Dynatrace hooked me up with

application performance metrics
my dev AND ops teams buy into.
Now weve turned our war room into
something more.... fun.
We use Dynatrace to record and playback scripted
transactions to eliminate inter-departmental rivalries and
finger pointing. The proof is in the data.
Sharing it this way improves everyones game.
Your serve

Learn more at:

dynatrace.com

24

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SPONSORED OPINION

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Digital Disruption, DevOps and the

Importance of Gap-free Data
Studies show that high-performing companies release software more
often. This digital disruption means less time to write new code and
faster deployments with shorter testing time. This need for speed
leads to gaps in application performance monitoring (APM), which
can undermine the user experience.
Gap-free APM data means that every activity for every operation is
captured and available for as long as needed from every single
method in your application infrastructure, from one end to the other.
There are three gaps organizations should eliminate:
Sampling and Aggregation. Some monitoring solutions rely on
aggregating data to find issues. This could work IF they kept the
data so that the actions leading up to problems could be traced
back - but they dont. No matter how intelligent the aggregation or
analytics, if the details saved from the transactions leading up to
the issue are only sampled, or the triggering event is missed, you
have to wait for the issue to happen again.

real-time analytics, etc. To ensure visibility into every moving part,

you need insight at the method level across every tier for all business
operations, or the root causes of problems are invisible.
Topology. Complexity escalates when pieces of the IT
infrastructure are combined e.g., virtualized servers and storage
can float across physical machines in the enterprise data center,
in multiple providers clouds, and even in a partners environment.
The gaps and inability to coordinate the inter-tier transactions from
sampling and snapshot methods are exacerbated dramatically by
the complexity of even the most optimal choreography.

CONCLUSION
If youre responsible for the performance of your companys code
from development and test and the transition to production, gapfree APM data helps isolate and resolve every issue quickly and
efficiently - with no finger pointing since no data point is missed. In a
world ruled by complexity, gap-free data not only creates a strong IT
foundation but also confidence in the digital experience delivered.

Methods. Todays applications are distributed, compound and

complex. This leads to complicated, end-to-end application logic as
developers string together databases, business logic, web services,

WRITTEN BY ASAD ALI

PRODUC T SPECI A LIS T DIREC T OR, DY NATR ACE

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

Dynatrace Application Monitoring

It ties together data across multiple servers to show exactly where a problem
may beacross an entire complex enterprise. - S. ENNAB, KRONOS INC.
CATEGORY
Application Performance
Management

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

Monthly

No

Gapless data from end-to-end, for every transaction with incredibly

low overhead
Outside-in approach: Start with the customer experience, not the app

CASE STUDY

Nordstrom, Inc. depends on the web to fuel growth and serve

customers. Performance Architect Gopal Brugalette explains: Our
customers are always looking for something new and betterso we
have to experiment and innovate. Their APM solution had to be the
technology leader, support a cultural shift to keep ahead of customer
expectations and provide strategic business information. Dynatrace
facilitated that change by giving us the insight into customer
experience throughout our organizationWe used to test code at
least three times to be sure it would work, Brugalette says. Now,
when Dynatrace doesnt flag any issues, we have confidence that
everything is OK the first time. This keeps our team moving quickly
and focused on improvement.
BLOG dynatrace.com/en/blogs/

25

Largest APM braintrust: 130k community members, 750 R&D

experts, 400 solution experts
The only cloud to legacy, multi-modal performance management suite
8,000+ customers, the largest market share in the APM industry

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
Verizon

Costco

Panera

Volkswagen

AAA

LinkedIn

TWITTER @dynatrace

Fidelity
Investments
Best Buy

WEBSITE dynatrace.com

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HOW TO KEEP YOUR THREADS BUSY

YOU AREN'T BUILDING SILICON, SO AS A DEVELOPER YOU
CAN'T CHANGE HOW LONG SOME THINGS TAKE. BUT THERE

WHAT PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS ARE MOST COMMON? WE SURVEYED OVER 600

DEVELOPERS AND RESULTS SUMMARIZED THEIR RESPONSES ON THE LEFT. WHAT
LATENCIES ARE JUST WHAT THEY ARE? WE TOOK DATA GATHERED BY PETER NORVIG

ARE PLENTY OF BOTTLENECKS YOU CAN FIND AND FIX.

AND JEFF DEAN AND VISUALIZED THEIR RESULTS BELOW.

L ATENCIES

B OT T LEN E C KS
KEY

FREQUENT ISSUES

SOME ISSUES

APPLICATION CODE

NO ISSUES

CLIENTS

13

RARE ISSUES

42

42

SCALED WHERE ONE CPU CYCLE [.3NS] = 1 SEC

ONE CPU CYCLE

=.3NS

WHICH = 1 SEC, OR IS
EQUAL TO CLAPPING
YOUR HANDS

L1 CACHE ACCESS

=.9NS

WHICH = 3 SEC, OR IS
EQUAL TO BLOWING YOUR
NOSE

L2 CACHE ACCESS

=2.8NS

CPU
9

24

27

40

MEMORY

14

20

30

NETWOR
9

WHICH = 9 SEC, OR IS
EQUAL TO BILL GATES
EARNING $2,250

L3 CACHE ACCESS

=12.9NS

18

33 40

WHICH = 43 SEC, OR IS EQUAL TO

COMPLETING AN AVERAGE MARIO
BROS. LEVEL 1-1 SPEED RUN

MAIN MEMORY ACCESS

AT I O N
APPLIC SERVER

=100NS

READ 1M BYTES

SEQUENTIALLY FROM MEMORY

=9 S

36

WHICH = 6 MIN, OR IS EQUAL TO

LISTENING TO QUEENS
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

WHICH = 9 HOURS, OR IS
EQUAL TO COMPLETING A
STANDARD US WORKDAY

SSD RANDOM FEED

=16 S

STORAGE

10

19

READ 1M BYTES

40

DATABASE

23

SEQUENTIALLY FROM SSD

31

WHICH = 14 HOURS, OR IS
EQUAL TO TAKING A FLIGHT
FROM NEW YORK TO BEIJING

=200 S
SE
D ATA B A

26

8 DAYS, OR IS EQUAL TO, IF THERE

WERE 8 DAYS IN A WEEK, IT
WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH FOR THE
BEATLES TO SHOW THEY CARE

READ 1M BYTES

SEQUENTIALLY FROM A SPINNING DISK

=2MS

WHICH = 70 DAYS, OR IS EQUAL

TO PLANTING AND HARVESTING
A ZUCCHINI

INTERNET: SF TO NYC

=71MS

43
S M A R T C O N T E N T F O R T E C H P R O F E S S IO N A L S

WHICH = 7 YEARS, OR IS EQUAL

TO ATTENDING AND GRADUATING
HOGWARTS (IF YOURE A WITCH
OR WIZARD)

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Practical Tips for Detecting and Fixing

Common App Performance Problems
Today's complex infrastructures combined with increasingly
distributed and multi-tiered applications make it hard for IT to
nail down performance issues. Making matters more difficult,
data and resources are often outside of a troubleshooters
immediate control. As a result, detecting and fixing application
performance problems has never been more difficult. Sluggish
end-user transactions may present themselves as being slow due
to the code. However, that slowness is often not the root cause,
but rather a symptom of an underlying infrastructural issue
hidden from view.
We've compiled a field guide that examines common, yet elusive
application performance problems that reveal themselves only
when you look at them from the right vantage point. They include:
Part 1, The Flaw of Averages, introduces the concept of
performance problems hiding in plain sight, yet masked by
inadequate monitoring.

Part 3, The Power of Correlation Analysis, explores a

particularly vexing issue: seemingly random, intermittent
slowness moving from one part of an app to another.
Part 4, The Performance Trinity, shows that while response
time and throughput get all the attention, understanding load is
the key to avoiding misdiagnosis and solving many issues.
Part 5, Eliminating Leaks, provides an overview of memory
leaks and similar behaviors, and introduces some common
approaches to troubleshoot leak-induced problems.
Part 6, Troubleshooting Leak-like Behavior, expands on
concepts from the previous section, discussing how to
troubleshoot other types of leak-like behavior.

This guide is based on the real-world experiences drawn

from helping hundreds of organizations optimize their
applications.Download the DevOps field guide.

Part 2, Obliterating Haystacks, shows how a big data approach

can help you quickly pinpoint the needle in a haystack by
removing the haystack from the equation.

WRITTEN BY KRISHNAN BADRINARAYANAN

PRODUCT MARKETING, STEELCENTRAL

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

SteelCentral AppInternals

BY RIVERBED

Were now able to look inside of the developers code without having to modify the code while its running in our
production environment. Thats fantastic. I cant imagine someone running a site of any real size without this capability.
- ERIC MCCR AW, GL OB A L W EB SY S T EMS M A N A GER , N AT ION A L INS T RUMEN T S

CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

Application Performance
Management

Quarterly

No

Never miss a problem: Monitor user experience, and

performance of code, SQL, infrastructure and web services

CASE STUDY
National Instruments public-facing website, ni.com, is updated frequently. The
web systems team, which is charged with keeping the site running optimally, spent
thousands of hours each year troubleshooting issues caused by new releases. This
caused tension between the web systems team and the developers, and impacted
customers as well.
The web systems team now uses AppInternals to find and fix root causes of
application performance problems. Developers use it as well to test their code in
QA. As a result, the team has:

Reduced troubleshooting time by 90%

Improved site stability and customer satisfaction
Reduced bugs in production by 20% to 30%
Reduced MTTR and have fewer incident calls
Increased site updates from 16 to 120 per year

BLOG rvbd.ly/20s7pW1

28

STRENGTHS

Get detailed insights: Trace all transactions from user to

backend while measuring system performance every second
Understand app behavior: Visualize dependencies, derive
insights or plan for capacity
See the complete picture: Integrate with AppResponse to
blend in network insights
Set up in 15 minutes; use on and off the cloud seamlessly;
no special skills needed

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
ABB
Hertz

National Instruments

Allianz

Linkon

SLS

Asurion

Michelin

TWITTER @SteelCentral

WEBSITE www.appinternals.com

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LATENCY NUMBERS EVERYONE

SHOULD KNOW
CHECKLIST BY DEEPAK KARANTH

SOFTWARE CONSULTANT, AGILE AND DEVOPS

COACH AT SOFTWAREYOGA.COM

Latency, in general terms, is the amount of time between a cause and the observation of its effect. In a computer
network, latency is defined as the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to
another. The table below presents the latency for the most common operations on commodity hardware. These data
points are only approximations and will vary with the hardware and the execution environment of your code. However,
their primary purpose is to enable you to make informed technical decisions to reduce latency.

OPERATION

NOTE

LATENCY

SCALED LATENCY

L1 cache reference

Level-1 cache, usually built onto the microprocessor chip itself.

0.5 ns

Consider L1 cache
reference duration is
1 sec

Branch
misprediction

During the execution of a program, the CPU predicts the next set
of instructions. Branch misprediction is when it makes the wrong
prediction. Hence, the previous prediction has to be erased and a
new one must be calculated and placed on the execution stack.

5 ns

10 s

L2 cache reference

Level-2 cache is memory built on a separate chip.

7 ns

14 s

Mutex lock/unlock

This is the simple synchronization method used to ensure exclusive

access to resources shared between many threads.

25 ns

50 s

Main memory
reference

Time to reference main memory (i.e. RAM).

100 ns

3m 20s

Compress 1K bytes
with Snappy

Snappy is a fast data compression and decompression library written

in C++ by Google and is used in many Google projects like BigTable, 3,000 ns
MapReduce, and other open-source projects.

1h 40 m

Send 1K bytes over

1 Gbps network

An approximation of time taken to send 1K bytes over the network,

in the absence of special measures to improve the efficiency of
sending data over the network.

10,000 ns

5h 33m 20s

Read 1 MB
sequentially from
memory

This includes the seek time as well as the time to read 1 MB of data.

250,000 ns

5d 18h 53m 20s

Round trip within

same data center

We can assume that the DNS lookup will be much faster within a
data center than it is to go over an external router.

500,000 ns

11d 13h 46m 40s

Read 1 MB
sequentially from
SSD disk

Assumes this is a SSD disk. SSD boasts random data access times
of 100,000 ns or less.

1,000,000 ns

23d 3h 33m 20s

Disk seek

Disk seek is the method used to get to the sector and head in the
disk where the required data exists.

10,000,000 ns

231d 11h 33m 20s

Read 1 MB
sequentially from
disk

Assumes this is a regular disk, not SSD. Check the difference in

comparison to SSD!

20,000,000 ns

462d 23h 6m 40s

Send packet CA ->

Netherlands -> CA

Round trip for packet data from U.S.A. to Europe and back.

150,000,000 ns

3472d 5h 20m

REFERENCES: DESIGNS, LESSONS AND ADVICE FROM BUILDING LARGE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS - PETER NORVIGS POST ON TEACH YOURSELF PROGRAMMING IN TEN YEARS

29

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IBM API Connect

API Connect integrates IBM StrongLoop and IBM API
Management with a built-in gateway, allowing you to create,
run, manage, and secure APIs and Microservices.

Unparalleled, integrated user experience.

30

ibm.biz/apiconnect
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SPONSORED OPINION

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Scalable, Reliable, Performant:

Building APIs in Node.js
APIs offer a fast, scalable way to expose just about anything,
from data to services to that crazy legacy infrastructure deep
in the guts of your company (no shame, everyone has it).
Due to its almost extreme ability to handle high-concurrency,
Node.js has become one of the most relied upon options for
building APIs. Major enterprises like WalMart and Netflix
have built or rebuilt major components of their platforms and
services in Node for this reason.
So, Node is powerful, but its most common use cases often
mean even small performance hits can add up fast. Here are
a few things to remember when building APIs in Node.
Beware the event loop. The first thing most learn about Node
is to stick to asynchronous I/O. But it isnt easy. For apps
that handle tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per
second, blocking for even fractions of a second can have a
noticeable performance cost. Profiling and visualization tools
like DTrace and FlameGraph are great for identifying where
your app is getting hung up.

Use a reverse proxy. A well-built Node API can reliably

handle a huge request volume, but everything has an
upper limit. For applications that dont need to maintain
state, Node scales well horizontally. This makes it a
perfect fit for building RESTful APIs. To maintain API
performance, put your cluster behind a reverse proxy to
distribute load and handle backend calls asynchronously.
Start with an optimized framework. There are many great
API frameworks written in Node that make it easy to build
APIs optimized to perform at scale. Options like the opensource LoopBack framework from StrongLoop even offer
easy-to-use add-on modules that manage other potential
performance bottlenecks like transactions with SQL and
NoSQL databases and object-relational mapping.

WRITTEN BY ALEX MURAMOTO

DE V EL OPER A DVOC AT E, IBM/STRONGLOOP

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

API Connect

BY STRONGLOOP AND IBM

IBM API Connect is a complete solution that addresses all aspects of the API lifecycle Create Run, Manage, Secure - for both on-premises and cloud environments.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

API Management

Agile

No

STRENGTHS
Simplify discovery of enterprise systems of record for automated
API creation

API LIFECYCLE

Provide self-service access for internal and third-party developers

IBM API Connect offers features to manage the API lifecycle, including:

through a market-leading gateway

Createcreate high-quality, scalable and secure APIs for application servers,

databases, enterprise service buses (ESB) and mainframes in minutes.

Ensure security and governance across the API lifecycle

Runtake advantage of integrated tooling to build, debug and deploy APIs and
microservices using the Node.js or Java.

Increase flexibility with hybrid cloud deployment

Managecreate and manage portals that allow developers to quickly discover

and consume APIs and securely access enterprise data, and monitor APIs to
improve performance.
SecureAdministrators can manage security and governance over APIs and the
microservices. IT can set and enforce API policies to secure back-end information
assets and comply with governance and regulatory mandates.
BLOG developer.ibm.com/apiconnect/blog/

31

TWITTER @ibmapiconnect

Unify management of Node.js and Java microservice applications

FEATURES
Unified Console
Quickly run APIs and microservices
Manage APIs with ease
Readily secure APIs and microservices
Create APIs in minutes
WEBSITE ibm.com/apiconnect

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How HTTP/2 Is
Changing Web
Performance Best
Practices
BY CLAY SMITH

QUICK VIEW
01
HTTP/2 is the successor of HTTP
that was ratified in May 2015.
02
It is changing long-standing web
performance optimizations.
03
Best practices for migrating and
using it in production are still being
finalized.
04
This article covers how HTTP/2 is
different, how it improves latency,
and how to debug it in production.
05
Measuring real-user performance is
critical during a HTTP/2 migration.

DEVELOPER ADVOCATE, NEW RELIC

he Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

underpins the World Wide Web
and cyberspace. If that sounds dated,
consider that the version of the protocol
most commonly in use, HTTP 1.1, is nearly
20 years old. When it wasratifiedbackin
1997, floppy drives and modems were
must-have digital accessories and Java
was a new, up-and-coming programming
language. Ratified in May 2015, HTTP/2
was created to address some significant
performance problems with HTTP 1.1 in the
modern web era. Adoption of HTTP/2 has
increased in the past year as browsers,
web servers, commercial proxies, and
major content delivery networks have
committed to or released support.
Unfortunately for people who write code for the web,
transitioning to HTTP/2 isnt always straightforward, and a
speed boost isnt automatically guaranteed. The new protocol

32

challenges some common wisdom when building performant

web applications, and many existing toolssuch as debugging
proxiesdont support it yet. This article is an introduction to
HTTP/2 and how it changes web performance best practices.

BINARY FRAMES: THE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF HTTP/2

One benefit of HTTP 1.1 (over non-secure connections, at least)
is that it supports interaction with web servers using text in
a telnet session on port 80: typingGET / HTTP/1.1 returns
an HTML document on most web servers. Because its a text
protocol, debugging is relatively straightforward.
Instead of text, requests and responses in HTTP/2 are
represented by a stream of binary frames, described as a basic
protocol unit in theHTTP/2 RFC. Each frame has a type that
serves a different purpose. The authors of HTTP/2 realized that
HTTP 1.1 will exist indefinitely (theGopher protocolstill is out
there, after all). The binary frames of an HTTP/2 request map
to an HTTP 1.1 request to ensure backwards compatibility.
There are some new features in HTTP/2 that dont map to HTTP
1.1, however. Server push (also known as cache push) and
stream reset are features that correspond to types of binary
frames. Frames can also have a priority that allows clients to
give servers hints about the priority of some assets over others.
Other than usingWireshark 2.0, one of the easiest ways
to actually see the individual binary frames is by using
the net-internals tab of Google Chrome (typechrome://
net-internals/#http2 into the address bar). The data

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can be hard to understand for large web pages.Rebecca

Murpheywrote auseful tool for displaying it visuallyin the
command line.

IMPLICATIONS FOR WEB PERFORMANCE: GOODBYE INLINING,

CONCATENATION, AND IMAGE SPRITES?

Additionally, the protocol used to fetch assets can be displayed

in the Chrome web developer toolsright click on the column
header and select Protocol:

HTTP/2 multiplexing has broad implications for front-end

web developers. It removes the need for several long-standing
workarounds that aim to reduce the number of connections by
bundling related assets, including:

All major browsers require HTTP/2 connections to be secure.

This is done for a practical reason: an extension of TLS called
Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN) lets servers
know the browser supports HTTP/2 (among other protocols)
and avoids an additional round trip. This also helps services
that dont understand HTTP/2, such as proxiesthey see only
encrypted data over the wire.

REDUCING LATENCY WITH MULTIPLEXING

A key performance problem with HTTP 1.1 is latency, or the
time it takes to make a request and receive a response. This
issue has become more pronounced as the number of images
and amount of JavaScript and CSS on a typical webpage
continue toincrease. Every time an asset is fetched, a new
TCP connection is generally needed. This requirement is
important for two reasons: the number of simultaneous open
TCP connections per host is limited by browsers, and theres
a performance penalty incurred when establishing new
connections. If a physical web server is far away from users
(for example, a user in Singapore requesting a page hosted at
a data center on the U.S. East Coast), latency also increases.
This scenario is not uncommonone recent reportsays that
more than 70% of global Internet traffic passes through the
unmarked data centers of Northern Virginia.
HTTP 1.1 offers different workarounds for latency issues,
including pipelining and the Keep-Alive header. However,
pipelining was never widely implemented, and the Keep-Alive
header suffered from head-of-line blocking: the current request
must complete before the next one can be sent.
In HTTP/2, multiple asset requests can reuse a single TCP
connection. Unlike HTTP 1.1 requests that use the Keep-Alive
header, the requests and response binary frames in HTTP/2
are interleaved and head-of-line blocking does not happen. The
cost of establishing a connection (the well-known three-way
handshake) has to happen only once per host. Multiplexing
is especially beneficial for secure connections because of the
performance cost involved with multiple TLS negotiations.

cat.jpg

TCP CONNECTION
robots.txt

Concatenating JavaScript and CSS files:Combining smaller

files into a larger file to reduce the total number of requests.
Image spriting:Combining multiple small images into one
larger image.
Domain sharding:Spreading requests for static assets
across several domains to increase the total number of open
TCP connections allowed by the browser.
Inlining assets:Bundling assets with the HTML document
source, including base-64 encoding images or writing
JavaScript code directly inside<script>tags.
With unbundled assets, there is greater opportunity to
aggressively cache smaller pieces of a web application. Its
easiest to explain this with an example:

fonts.css
news.css
about.css

fontse471dee.css

aboutbd48df43.css

newsffd4523e.css

footerdd45fdeb3.css

UNBUNDLED

footer.css
appe461bde5901e.
css

A concatenated and fingerprinted CSS file unbundles into four

smaller fingerprinted files.
A common concatenation pattern has been to bundle style sheet
files for different pages in an application into a single CSS file
to reduce the number of asset requests. This large file is then
fingerprinted with an MD5 hash of its contents in the filename
so it can be aggressively cached by browsers. Unfortunately, this
approach means that a very small change to the visual layout
of the site, like changing the font style for a header, requires the
entire concatenated file to be downloaded again.
When smaller asset files are fingerprinted, significant
amounts of JavaScript and CSS components that dont change
frequently can be cached by browsersa small refactor of
a single function no longer invalidates a massive amount of
JavaScript application code or CSS.

application.js

Requests for mult iple assets on a single host use a single TCP
connect ion in HTTP/2.

33

Lastly, deprecating concatenation can reduce front-end build

infrastructure complexity. Instead of having several pre-build

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steps that concatenate assets, they can be included directly in

the HTML document as smaller files.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDES OF USING HTTP/2 IN THE REAL WORLD

Optimizing only for HTTP/2 clients potentially penalizes
browsers that dont yet support it. Older browsers still prefer
bundled assets to reduce the number of connections. As of
February 2016,caniuse.comreports globalbrowser support
of HTTP/2 at 71%. Much like dropping Internet Explorer 8.0
support, the decision to adopt HTTP/2 or go with a hybrid
approach must be made using relevant data on a per-site basis.
As described in apost by Kahn Academy Engineeringthat
analyzed HTTP/2 traffic on its site, unbundling a large number of
assets can actually increase the total number of bytes transferred.
Withzlib, compressing a single large file is more efficient than
compressing many small files. The effect can be significant on an
HTTP/2 site that has unbundled hundreds of assets.
Using HTTP/2 in browsers also requires assets to be delivered
over TLS. Setting up TLS certificates can be cumbersome for
the uninitiated. Fortunately, open-source projects such asLets
Encryptare working on making certificate registration more
accessible.

A WORK IN PROGRESS
Most users dont care what application protocol your site
usesthey just want it to be fast and work as expected.
Although HTTP/2 has been officially ratified for almost a year,
developers are still learning best practices when building
faster websites on top of it. The benefits of switching to HTTP/2
depend largely on the makeup of the particular website and
what percentage of its users have modern browsers. Moreover,
debugging the new protocol is challenging, and easy-to-use
developer tools are still under construction.
Despite these challenges, HTTP/2 adoption is growing.
According to researchers scanning popular web properties,
thenumber of top sites that use HTTP/2 is increasing,
especially afterCloudFlareandWordPressannounced
their support in late 2015. When considering a switch, its
important to carefully measure and monitor asset- and
page-load time in a variety of environments. As vendors and
web professionals educate themselves on the implications of
this massive change, making decisions from real user data is
critical. In the midst of awebsite obesity crisis, now is a great
time to cut down on the total number of assets regardless of
the protocol.

4/4 MAJOR BROWSER VENDORS AGREE: HTTPS IS REQUIRED

Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome all agree:
HTTPS is required to use HTTP/2 in the first place. This
is critical because of a new extension to Transport Layer
Security (TLS) that allows browsers and clients to negotiate

34

which application-layer protocol to use. When a TLS

connection is established for the first time, the server
broadcasts support for HTTP 1.1, SPDY, or HTTP/2 without an
additional round trip.
Because ofchanges Google recently announced, its critical
that backend SSL libraries are updated before Chrome drops
support for the olderNext Protocol Negotiation.standard in
favor ofApplication Layer Protocol Negotiation Unfortunately,
for almost every modern Linux distribution, this means
compiling web server software from source code with
OpenSSL version 1.0.2 (not a trivial task).
With the latest version of OpenSSL installed on servers,
however, its possible to check hosts for HTTP/2 support from
the command line:
me@ubuntu-trusty-64:~$ echo | openssl s_client
-alpn h2 -connect google.com:443 | grep ALPN
ALPN protocol: h2
DONE
Aweb-based tool from KeyCDNand theis-http2 packagecan
also help determine host support.
The transition to the new protocol is relatively
straightforward for sites that are already delivered securely.
For non-secure sites, web servers (and potentially CDNs) will
need to be correctly configured for HTTPS. New open-source
projects such asLets Encryptaim to make this process as
easy, free, and automated as possible. Of course, regardless
of HTTP/2 support, moving to HTTPS is becoming more
important. Some search engines now use secure sites as
apositive signal in page ranking, and privacy advocates and
industry experts strongly recommend it.

DETERMINING BACK END AND CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

SUPPORT
If HTTPS is properly configured, the next step is determining
if the server or proxy software supports HTTP/2. The IETF
HTTP Working Groupmaintains a comprehensive list of
known implementations on its website, and popular web
servers have all released or committed to support. Most
popular application development languages have HTTP/2
packages as well.
SERVER OR CLOUD PROVIDER

HTTP/2 SUPPORT

Apache

> 2.4.17

nginx

> 1.9.5

Microsoft IIS

Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

Heroku

No (as of 1/16)

Google AppEngine

Available with TLS

Amazon S3

No (as of 1/16)

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Support for the full suite of HTTP/2 features, especially server

push, is not guaranteed. Its necessary to read the release notes
to determine which features are fully supported.
If your site uses assets delivered by a Content Delivery
Network (CDN), major vendors like CloudFlare and KeyCDN
already support the new protocol even if your back end
doesnt. With some providers, enabling HTTP/2 between your
client and the edge locations can be as easy as toggling a radio
button on a web form.

all traffic sent over that interface. The output can be

overwhelming, but its easy to filter HTTP/2-only traffic by
typing http2 into the filter text box. When HTTP/2 packets
are captured, they can now be decrypted into individual
HTTP2 binary frames:
Using the tabs at the bottom of the data panel, its possible to
see the decrypted frames. HEADERS frames, which are always
compressed, can also be displayed decompressed.

THE TRANSITION IS NOT YET STRAIGHTFORWARD

CDN

SUPPORTS HTTP/2 AS OF JAN. 2016?

Akamai

Yes

CloudFare

Yes

KeyCDN

Yes

Amazon CloudFront

No

USING WIRESHARK FOR DEBUGGING

HTTP/2 tooling still has a long way to go before catching up
with HTTP 1.1. Because HTTP/2 is a binary protocol, simple
debugging using telnet wont work, and standard debugging
proxies likeCharlesandFiddlerdo not offer support as of
January 2016.
Inthe first part of this article, we discussed how to use
Chrome Net Internals (chrome://net-internals#http2) to
debug traffic. For more advanced analysis, using the low-level
C (or the Python bindings) of thenghttp2 libraryor Wireshark
2.0 is needed. Here, well focus onWireshark.
Configuring Wireshark to view an HTTP/2 frame requires
additional setup because all traffic is encrypted. To view
Firefox or Chrome HTTP/2 traffic, you have to log TLS
session information to a file specified by the environment
variableSSLKEYLOGFILE. On Mac OS X, set the environment
variable before launching the browser from the command line
(you can see Windows instructionshere):
$ export SSLKEYLOGFILE=~/Desktop/tls_fun.log
$ open -a Google\ Chrome https://nghttp2.org/
Wireshark must be configured to use the SSLKEYLOGFILE in
the preferences menu under the SSL protocol listing.
When starting Wireshark for the first time, a network
interface needs to be selected. Filtering only on port 443 is a
good idea since all HTTP/2 traffic in Chrome is secure.
After clicking on the shark icon, recording begins for

35

For many web applications in early 2016, transitioning

to HTTP/2 is not yet straightforward. Not only is HTTPS
required in order to use the new protocol in browsers, its
likely that server software will also need to be upgraded. In
some cases, particularly with Backend-as-a-Service providers
or Content Delivery Networks, HTTP/2 support might not
be availableor even promisedyet. Lastly, easy-to-use
debugging tools are still being worked on.
As many teams have already discovered, it is likely that
migrating any large site to HTTP/2 will contain surprises.
Despite these challenges, many large web properties have
successfully launched HTTP/2 support withsignificant
performance benefits. Carefully measuring real-user
performance and understanding the limitations of
current tooling is helpful for making the transition as smooth
as possible.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Lets Encrypt
Why isnt HTTPS everywhere yet?
HTTP/2 on IIS
Moving to HTTP/2 on nginx 1.9.5
is-http npm module
Is TLS Fast Yet?

This art icle was written by Clay Smith, with contribut ions
oftechnical feedback and invaluable suggest ionsbyJef f
Martens, Product Manager forNew Relic Browser, and web
performance expertAndy Davies.

C L AY S M I T H is a Developer Advocate at New Relic. He

previously was a Senior Software Engineer at PagerDuty and
has built many APIs and web applications at startups and
large enterprises. As the author of one of the first apps written
using Swift, he also likes to experiment with iOS development.
Clay studied Computer Science with an emphasis on Artificial
Intelligence and Linguistics at the University of Chicago.

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Theres nothing about Java

that AppDynamics doesnt see.
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Transaction Scorecard

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36

963

Slow

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SPONSORED OPINION

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Whats Exciting About Java 9 and

Application Performance Monitoring
In todays modern computing age, constant
enhancements in software innovations are driving
us closer to an era of software revolution. Perhaps
in the distant future, that may be how the 21st
century is remembered best. Among the popular
software languages out there, however, Java
continues to have the largest industry footprint,
running applications around the globe producing
combined annual revenue in trillions. Thats why
keeping up on the JDK is a high priority. Despite
having a massive API to improve programming

productivity, Java has also grown due to its high

performance yet scalable JVM runtime, building
among the fastest computing modern applications.
As Javas footprint expands, JDK innovations
continue to impact billions of lines of code. As
AppDynamics continues to grow, our focus towards
supporting Java is only furthered by our customer
use & industry adoption of the JVM.
WRITTEN BY AAKRIT PRASAD
HEADING CORE & APM PRODUCTS, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT,
APPDY NAMICS

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

Application Intelligence Platform

BY APPDYNAMICS

If your business runs on apps, Application Intelligence is for you. Real-time

insights into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

Application Performance
Management

Bi-Yearly

No

Application Performance Management is a technology

solution that provides end-to-end business transactioncentric management of the most complex and distributed
applications. Auto-discovered transactions, dynamic
baselining, code-level diagnostics, and Virtual War
Room collaboration ensure rapid issue identification and
resolution to maintain an ideal user experience.

CASE STUDY

"AppDynamics has enabled us to move towards data-driven

troubleshooting rather than gut-feels. The solution gives
us the application intelligence to know when things arent
functioning optimally."

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS

- Nitin Thakur, technical operations manager, Cisco

BLOG

37

blog.appdynamics.com

NASDAQ

eHarmony

DIRECTV

Cisco

Citrix

Hallmark

TWITTER @AppDynamics

WEBSITE appdynamics.com

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Benchmarking
Java Logging
Frameworks
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

logging is its impact on your applications

performance. Theres no doubt logging can cost

you some speed; the question is how much. When
youre armed with some real numbers, its much
easier to find the right amount to log. In this article,
well compare the performance and reliability of
four popular Java logging frameworks.

THE CONTENDERS
For this test, we investigated four of the most commonly used Java
logging frameworks:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Log4j 1.2.17
Log4j 2.3
Logback 1.1.3 using SLF4J 1.7.7
JUL

We tested each framework using three types of appenders:

file, syslog, and socket. For syslog and socket appenders, we
sent log data to a local server over both TCP and UDP. We also
tested asynchronous logging using each frameworks respective
AsyncAppender. Note that this test doesnt include asynchronous
loggers, which promise even faster logging for Log4j 2.3.

38

01
In distributed, cloud-based
environments, its equally important
to understand both application and
network performance.
02
Active monitoring, often used for
website performance, can also
provide you with insights into cloud
provider networks.
03
Active monitoring can provide you a
stack trace for your network, showing
the performance of each network that
your traffic traverses.
04
Consider adding key network
connectivity and service metrics to
your arsenal in order to get ahead of
cloud outages.

BY ANDRE NEWMAN

ne of the most common arguments against

QUICK VIEW

but the first was discarded due to large startup times to warm the
JIT). To simulate a workload, we generated prime numbers in the
background. We repeated this test three times and averaged the
results. This stress test also drives the logging frameworks harder
than they would in a typical workload because we wanted to push
them to their limit. For example, in a typical workload, you wont
see as many dropped events, because events will be more spread out
over time, allowing the system to catch up.
We performed all testing on an Intel Core i7-4500U CPU with 8 GB of
RAM and Java SE 7 update 79.
In the interest of fairness, we chose to keep each framework as close
to its default configuration as possible. You might experience a boost
in performance or reliability by tweaking your framework to suit
your application.

APPENDER CONFIGURATION
We configured our file appenders to append entries to a single file
using a PatternLayout of %d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} %-5level - %msg%n.
Our socket appenders sent log data to a local socket server, which
then wrote the entries to a file (see this link for an example using
Log4j 1.2.17). Our syslog appenders sent log data to a local rsyslog
server, which then forwarded the entries to Loggly.
The AsyncAppender was used with the default configuration, which
has a buffer size of 128 events (256 events for Logback) and does not
block when the buffer is full.

SETUP AND CONFIGURATION

TEST RESULTS

Our goal was to measure the amount of time needed to log a number
of events. Our application logged 100,000 DEBUG events (INFO
events for JUL) over 10 iterations (we actually did 11 iterations,

Logback came ahead in synchronous file logging, performing

9% faster than Log4j 2.3 and 11% faster than Log4j 1.2.17. All three

FILE APPENDER

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frameworks significantly outperformed JUL, which took over four

times as long as Logback.
Using asynchronous appenders, run times decreased noticeably.
Logback once again showed the highest performance but
dropped most of its log events in order to do so76%! None of the
other frameworks dropped any events running synchronously
or asynchronously. This is due to the behavior of Logbacks
AsyncAppender, which drops events below WARNING level if
the queue becomes 80% full. Log4j 1.2.17 saw improved run times
while managing to successfully record each event. Log4j 2.3 saw an
increase in performance over the synchronous appender, but came
third after Log4j 1.2.17.

SOCKET APPENDER
UDP

Log4j 2.3s socket appender was the slowest combination we tested.

It was also one of the most error prone, dropping 44% of the events
sent to it.
Using an asynchronous appender provided an almost 30%
improvement in performance but with a 6% decrease in reliability.

TCP

Log4j 1.2.17 showed a nearly 3-second improvement over Log4j 2.3

when using TCP. However, the star of the show is Logback, which
managed to perform in less than one-fifth the time of Log4j 2.3. You
can see the Log4j 2.3 test results here.

SYSLOG APPENDER
UDP

Using UDP, each framework experienced a similar rate of dropped

messages due to packet loss. While Log4j 1.2.17 was the fastest, it
also experienced the highest drop rate. Compared with Log4j 1.2.17,
Log4j 2.3 saw a 1% improvement in dropped messages with a 9%
drop in performance. SLF4J provided a somewhat more reliable
experience for a substantial drop in performance.

When the application is logging asynchronously, Log4j 2.3 showed

a marked improvement. Log4j 1.2.17 maintained its run time, but
showed a small increase in the number of dropped events. Logback
maintained its performance lead, but in doing so dropped over 90%
of events.

Using an asynchronous appender resulted in a much shorter run

time but also a much higher drop in reliability. The most striking
difference came for Logback, which ran nearly 10 times faster but
had eight times the number of dropped events.

CONCLUSION
The combination that we found to offer the best performance and
reliability is Log4j 1.2.17s FileAppender using an AsyncAppender.
This setup consistently completed in the fastest time with no
dropped events. For raw performance, the clear winner was
Logbacks FileAppender using an AsyncAppender.

TCP
As expected, TCP with Log4j 2.3 proved to be a much more reliable
transmission method. (You can view the test results here.) We saw
a small number of dropped messages, but it was negligible when
compared with UDP. The cost of this higher reliability is a run time
thats nearly twice as long.
With an asynchronous appender, we saw a decent boost in
performance with no drop in throughput.

39

Theres often a trade-off between fast and reliable logging. Logback

in particular maximized performance by dropping a larger
number of events, especially when we used an asynchronous
appender. Log4j 1.2.17 and 2.3 tended to be more conservative but
couldnt provide nearly the same performance gains.
A N D R E N E W M A N is a technical writer and regular contributor
to Loggly. He is also a software developer specializing in enterprise
application development. Andre has over a decade of experiencing
developing in Java, VB.NET, C#, and C++. He has additional experience in
systems administration and deployment. When Andre's not busy writing,
he's either hacking away on an Arduino or building smartwatch apps.

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SPONSORED OPINION

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Using HTTP/2 to Reduce Latency and

Make Your Web Applications Faster
Its been a year since HTTP/2, the latest version of the network
protocol the web runs on, was published as a spec by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). One year after the spec was
introduced, adoption of HTTP/2 has steadily increased to 7.4% of
all websites, according to W3 Techs, an adoption percentage that
has more than doubled in the last six months.

for multiple connections between the client and the server. This
reduces network latency, which in turn makes web pages load
faster. HTTP/2 also compresses HTTP headers, allows the server to
push resources to the client that havent been requested yet, and
allows the client to indicate to the servers which resources are more
important than others.

Why should you migrate your web applications to HTTP/2? The main
reason is speed. An HTTP/2-based site will simply load faster than
a site in HTTP/1.1, a nearly 20-year-old protocol that doesnt do
a very efficient job of handling the network handshake between
browser client and web server that happens every time a user tries to
access a web page. As websites have grown larger and more complex,
these inefficiencies have proved to be a drag on web performance.
Organizations have had to adapt by using techniques such as domain
sharding, in-line images, and file concatenation.

The end result is that a browser client can make faster and fewer
connections to a web host, speeding up the time it takes to
download content from that server. The smaller content payloads
and optimized TCP connections of HTTP/2 are especially ideal for
mobile applications and sites.

HTTP/2 largely remedies this. The new version of the protocol

allows multiple requests to be sent from client to server, one after
the other, on the same TCP connection, while responses to those
requests can be received out of order eliminating the need

There are various ways to start using HTTP/2. You can upgrade
your web server to the latest versions of Apache and Nginx. Your
hosting or CDN provider can upgrade your site to HTTP/2 even
faster. No coding changes are required. Then keep monitoring your
sites to make sure they live up to their potential.

WRITTEN BY DENNIS CALLAGHAN

DIRECTOR OF INDUSTRY INNOVATION, CATCHPOINT SYSTEMS

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

Catchpoint Synthetic

BY CATCHPOINT SYSTEMS

Smarter, faster end-user monitoring for digital business

CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

EUM (End-User Experience

Monitoring) / Performance
Monitoring

8x Annually

No

End-user experience monitoring (EUM) designed

expressly for digital business

CASE STUDY

Priceline.com relies on innovative proprietary architecture that combines internal and third-party
partner components to offer high-performing websites and services to millions of customers. Speed,
scalability, and consistency are keys to Priceline.com's continued success.

WHAT THEY USE

Catchpoint Synthetic
Object Monitoring

DNS Monitoring
Hosts & Zone Monitoring
Real User Measurement

THE SOLUTION
Utilizing Catchpoint's monitoring locations to proactively monitor
multistep transactions, DNS services, and API calls: Priceline continuouly
benchmarks performance with industry peers to define appropriate goals to
maintain its leadership position.
Catchpoint Insight: Priceline automatically correlated internal data with
synthetic monitoring metrics to diagnose problems and rapidly find root
causes across complex multi-tier architectures.
Zones and Hosts: Underperforming components (third-party vendors,
internal components, etc.) were quickly troubleshooted.

The industrys most extensive monitor types

The industrys most extensive global node coverage

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS
Business Insider

Honeywell

Verizon

Alerts: Problems and bottlenecks were immediatly communicated to Priceline.

Comcast

Kate Spade

Wayfair

Catchpoint Analytics: Priceline utilized Catchpoint's analytics to examine

the impact of front-end code optimizations.

Google

Trip Advisor

BLOG blog.catchpoint.com

41

Only EUM platform to simultaneously capture, index,

and store object-level data

TWITTER @catchpoint

WEBSITE catchpoint.com

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Executive
Insights on
Performance +
Monitoring

QUICK VIEW
01
Performance and monitoring grow
more challenging as more data and
more layers of abstraction are added
with no end in sight.
02
Customers need real user monitoring
from the server to the application
across all devices to understand the
performance of their apps for the
optimal UX.
03
Developers need to measure
performance earlier in the
development process and be
sensitive to how latency can accrue
as their application integrates with
other apps.

BY TOM SMITH
MARKETING STRATEGIST AND RESEARCH ANALYST, DZONE

To gather insights on the state of performance and

monitoring today, we spoke with 11 executives at nine
companies providing performance and monitoring
services to clients.
Specifically, we spoke to:
Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist, AppDynamics |
Michael Sage, Chief DevOps Evangelist, Blazemeter |
Rob Malnati, V.P. Marketing and Pete Mastin, Product
Evangelist, Cedexis | Charlie Baker, V.P. Product
Marketing, Dyn | Andreas Grabner, Technology
Strategist, Dynatrace | Dave Josephson, Developer
Evangelist, and Michelle Urban, Director of Marketing,
Librato | Bob Brodie, CTO, SUMOHeavy | Christian
Beedgen, CTO and Co-Founder, Sumo Logic |
Nick Kephart, Senior Director Product Marketing,
ThousandEyes
KEY FINDINGS
01 The keys to performance and monitoring are

providing a holistic view of 1) whats happening from

the infrastructure to the application, regardless of the device,
and 2) the quality of the UX the end user is having. Tools are

42

enabling companies to automate and scale monitoring so

they can be notified of road blocks or traffic jams that may be
negatively affecting the customer experience (CX). You want
to know why people are not using your appif its slow or
broken, or just not useful. Dont just see the performance but
know the why behind the performance. Learn the best path
to reduce latency. You need access to all of the data to be able
to provide a thorough analysis. While artificial intelligence
(AI) is moving us towards full post-deployment automation
with no human intervention required, were not there yet.
The biggest changes to performance and monitoring
have been the movement from the data center to the
cloud and the increase in the complexity of applications,
which has made monitoring performance more challenging.
Seeing the end-to-end user experience is the best way to
monitor; however, new cloud infrastructures, new levels
of abstraction, and distributed microservices are making
it difficult to stay ahead and provide the visibility clients
need. DevOps and Continuous Delivery have changed the
way we create software as well as speed to market. Apps
have changed and expectations have changed. New Relic
came along in 2008 and enabled users to monitor for $150
per server, providing real-time statistics and visibility into
applications, databases, browsers, and disks. Such tools
have reduced mean time to innocence, enabling users to
quickly identify if IP issues are taking place inside or outside
their system for quicker problem resolution. Bleeding edge
companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Netf lix) are
pushing to machine learning and metacomputation to know

02

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whats happening. Were also seeing a movement to unlock

data between customer boundaries so clients with the same
vendor can benefit from each others data.

03 Everyone has created their own proprietary solution

but tend to use additional resources like New Relic,

Splunk, and open-source tools to build out the capabilities of
their solution. While the solutions are proprietary, they are
built to seamlessly integrate with other solutions and support
all languages.
Scalability is the most consistently mentioned real
world problem to be solved, followed by the need to
monitor across an ever broader range of platform formats
and application types to ensure a good UX. Scalability
is particularly important to e-commerce and companies
expanding their presence from brick and mortar to digital.
Its important to help companies know where to deploy in
the cloud and how to automatically bce traffic loads, while
providing a low mean time to innocence. Shifting the
measurement of performance earlier in the build cycle will
enable companies to proactively find and correct problems
as early as possible. Multi-vendor and multi-path are keys
to providing an outstanding UX given the vagaries of the
internet. Understand and test how minor code changes can
affect the performance and UX of the app since any issues
will become amplified as use increases.

04

Businesses generally fail to understand the

implications poor performance can have on their
business and what can be done to improve performance
post-ISP, which is the most common issue vendors see
affecting their clients. In addition, given the changes with
the use of microservices and multiple platforms, you have
a distributed system that can be difficult to understand
and which you have very little control over. Theres a need
to stay abreast of the changes and prepare to scale. All of
these factors reinforce the need for trusted performance
monitoring providers for the web and applications.

05

06 The biggest opportunities for improving performance

is becoming more educated about the subject

and injecting performance monitoring earlier in the
development process. Real user monitoring (RUM) will be
the standard in the future; however, users need to become
aware of the tools available for monitoring and improving
performance. As companies learn the effect of an
improved UX, they will put more emphasis on improving
performance. Moving to the cloud will eliminate certain
infrastructure issues while new tools and technologies will
enable companies to take advantage of elasticity without
putting a burden on their IT staff.

The only concerns about the current state of

performance and monitoring revolve around customers
lack of understanding of the importance of measuring
performance in the development process, the increasing
complexity of the tools needed to monitor, and the exponential

07

43

increases in data and machines. There are still a lot of

companies that do not view performance and monitoring as
integral to the development process. Furthermore, as tools
become more powerful, they become more complex, and you
have to hire people to manage the tools.

08 While there were a wide variety of suggestions

for developers to optimize the performance of the

applications they are developing, three were mentioned
more than once: 1) have a DevOps mentality and be familiar
with the DevOps process; 2) have a holistic view and
understanding of performance and monitoring; and, 3) stay
up to date with PHPstandards, coding, and messaging.
Additional suggestions included: understand architectural
concepts; understand automation since it is inevitable;
become familiar with load testing; understand where
bottlenecks are; know how to optimize performance; know
infrastructure and cloud-based requirements; dont assume
third-party services will always work; and be humbledont
get wed to a single way of doing something, as you will need
to figure out workarounds to unanticipated problems.

09

Additional considerations, or final thoughts, about

performance and monitoring included:

Understand performance is cross-functional and not the

responsibility of a particular team. While someone has to
take responsibility, dont let DevOps become a center of
excellence silo.
Keep in mind whats free open source and whats
expensive software. Try before you buy. A lot of software
has 30-day free trials. Take advantage of these trials to get
to know the software.
Remember the role of content delivery networks (CDNs)
is important with regards to performance. People need
to understand that dynamic and static content are not all
the same.
Think of ways to stay up to date with the changes in
technologies.
Get educated about the space and the challenges that
exist with regards to using the internet as the primary
vehicle for interacting with businesses and customers.
Remember that moving to the cloud is adding a different
level of abstraction. You think you can trust whats
underneath; however, you lose the visibility, and the
ability to know, as the layers of abstraction increase.
Consider that AI is where the major change is coming
to manage infrastructure in the future where we can let
machines do more of the work.
TO M S M I T H is a Research Analyst at DZone who excels
at gathering insights from analyticsboth quantitative and
qualitativeto drive business results. His passion is sharing
information of value to help people succeed. In his spare time, you
can find him either eating at Chipotle or working out at the gym.

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ITS TIME FOR A

NEW GENERATION OF JAVA MONITOR
FusionReactor goes beyond traditional APM tools to give
you unrivaled insight into how your Java code performs and
executes in production
FusionReactor doesnt just monitor and put the burden on you to
figure things out. FusionReactor puts you in control, so that you can
instantly isolate production issues and performance bottlenecks with
our integrated low overhead Production Debugger and Profiler.
Plus pro-actively improve application resilience with FusionReactors
unique Crash Protection capability.
No other monitoring solution gives you the same level of depth,
insight or control of your Java applications in production.

FusionReactor - Find it. Fix it. Prevent it.

Start Free Trial

44

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Copyright 2016, Intergral GmbH. All rights reserved. All trademarks, names, logos referenced, belong to their respective companies.

SPONSORED OPINION

Still using log files to isolate production

issues? Perhaps there is an alternative
It was interesting to read in the 2015 DZone APM Guide that the
#1 tool for finding production issues is application logs (94%). Wow
thats sad because delving through logs is painstaking, timeconsuming and generally not very much fun. How can this be? Weve
got all these wonderful APM tools available yet developers still
reach for log files! Is that the best we can do?

use in their development/test environments. Developers need to

see things like:

Traditional APM tools provide some neat metric graphs and can alert
you when something seems wrong, but they dont tell you much at
the level of detail software engineers need to get to the actual root
of the issue. So we grep through our logs, dive into the heap, tally
our object instances, run stack trace over and over, guess some
breakpoints or include debug data into our code.

transactions, web & JDBC requests not just measured by time, but
by memory consumed

When something breaks in production, developers must go deeper

than resource usage or business transaction fail rates they need
real-time insight and transparency into what the application is
actually doing at the point that its breaking in production.

stack trace + local variable visibility, at the exact point of failure or

deadlock
profiling information, when code is run against real production data

class loads/unloads & memory allocation (heap + non-heap) across time

We need a new generation of monitor, which not only provides

core APM features, such as metrics and alerting, but also includes
low-overhead production-grade tools to give access to detailed
information needed to deep-dive & quickly figure out the hard stuff
developers need to fix.
Before you reach for app logs next time, check out FusionReactor.

In order to pinpoint issues in production we believe developers

need additional tooling which is actually closer to what they would

WRITTEN BY DAVID TATTERSALL

CEO - IN T ERGR A L GMBH M A K ERS OF FUSIONRE AC T OR

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT

FusionReactor

fusion

reactor

BY INTERGRAL GMBH

TM

FusionReactor goes beyond traditional APM tools to give you unrivaled insight
into how your Java code performs and executes in production environments.
CATEGORY

NEW RELEASES

OPEN SOURCE?

STRENGTHS

APM for Developers

3 Months

No

Deep dive Java APM

Low-impact debugger and profiler (designed for production use)

CASE STUDY

Bullhorn provides cloud-based CRM solutions for relationship-driven

businesses. Its zero-click data capture technology and relationship
intelligence gives companies what they need, from insight to action,
to win new customers and keep them happy.

Full featured monitoring capability - alerting & metric analysis

FusionReactor allows our team at Bullhorn to respond to issues

quickly before they become customer impacting. It's short polling
interval gives us a needed edge when it comes to ensuring an
excellent experience for our customers. FusionReactor outshines the
competition with its rapid response time, small hardware footprint
and low total cost of ownership

Hybrid APM - available as On Premise and Cloud (optional)

Auto Europe

Bullhorn

- Brad Witherell, Manager, Systems Engineering and Administration Bullhorn

Allianz

Primoris Services InVision

BLOG blog.fusion-reactor.com

45

Crash protection capability to increase application resilience

Seamless integration to run alongside other APM tools

Low cost, yet highly functional

NOTABLE CUSTOMERS

TWITTER @Fusion_Reactor

Hasbro

WEBSITE fusion-reactor.com

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Why You Need to

Know Your Pages
Conversion Impact
Score

QUICK VIEW
01
Not all web pages are created equal.
People react differently to slowdowns on
different pages in the transaction path.
02
Knowing your pages load times is
just a first step. You need to correlate
load time with other metrics that are
meaningful to your business.
03
Conversion Impact Scoring keeps you
from wasting limited performance optimization resources on the wrong pages.
04
Every site is different. Page groups
that have high Conversion Impact
Scores for another retailer may not
generate the same scores for you.
Thats why you need to use your own
user data.

BY TAMMY EVERTS
SENIOR RESEARCHER AND EVANGELIST, SOASTA

WHAT IS A CONVERSION?
A conversion is what happens when a person whos browsing a site
converts to being a user or buyer of the service or product that site
offers. So if youre a SaaS vendor, a conversion happens when a person
signs up to use your serviceor if youre an e-commerce shop, when
a person buys something. Conversions can also include actions like
signing up for a newsletter or making a donation.
The conversion funnel is
the start-to-finish path that a
user takes when they convert
from browsing to buying/
downloading/etc. A conversion
funnel for an ecommerce site
might look something like this (note
that percentages are arbitrary and
extremely optimistic):

ALL VISITORS TO WEBSITE (100%)

BROWSE/SEARCH FOR PRODUCT (90%)
VISIT PRODUCT PAGE (70%)
PLACE ITEM
IN A CART
(20%)
COMPLETE
PURCHASE
(10%)

For a site that does hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of

transactions in a day, even tiny changes in conversion ratesuch as
increasing from 2.1% to 2.2%can have a huge impact on revenue.

PERFORMANCE SLOWDOWNS AFFECT CONVERSIONS

DIFFERENTLY ON DIFFERENT PAGES
When pages get slower,
conversion rates suffer.
But some types of pages
suffer more than others.
For example, on retail sites,
slow browse pages have
a greater negative impact
on performance than slow
checkout pages.

CONVERSION RATE

Im going to explain how to determine which pages you should focus

on optimizing in order to increase conversions and, ultimately,
deliver the highest ROI.

Conversion rate is the percentage of total user sessions that result in a

conversion. In the conversion funnel graphic above, the conversion rate
is the number of people who completed a purchase: 10%. Conversion rates
are typically in the 2-5% range. Anything higher than that is amazing.

CONVERSION RATE

Here you can see that, for

one ecommerce vendor, the
conversion rate shrank by
about 50% when the load time
for browse pages increased
from 1 to 6 seconds (right, top):
For the same retailer, the
impact on conversion
rate was much less when
checkout pages degraded in
speed (right, bottom):

CONVERSION RATE

3
PAGE LOAD TIME (SECONDS)

46

PAGE LOAD TIME (SECONDS)

CONVERSION RATE

heres a widely held belief that the only people

who need to care about conversions are
people in sales and business development. Wrong.
Conversions are the lifeblood of your business. If
you touch your companys website in any waybe
it design, marketing, or developmentthen your
actions have an impact on conversions. You need
to understand what that impact is.

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Looking at these two graphs side by side, you could be tempted

to deduce that, because conversions were hurt more by slow
browse pages than by slow checkout pages, the site owner
should focus energy on optimizing the browse pages. This might
be truebut it might not be true, too. This is where Conversion
Impact Scoring comes in.

WHAT IS THE CONVERSION IMPACT SCORE?

The Conversion Impact Score is a relative score that ranks page
groups by their propensity to negatively impact conversions due
to high load times. For each page group, the Conversion Impact
Score is calculated using the proportion of overall requests that
are associated with that group, along with the correlation between
its load times and number of conversions. The more negative the
score, the more detrimental to conversions that high load times for
that page group are, relative to the other page groups.

The slowest group is Checkout SendTo, followed by Home,

Account SignIn and Checkout Order Confirmation.
Without knowing the Conversion Impact Scores for these page
groups, you might focus on optimizing pages according to how
slow they load. Looking at load time, this is the order in which
youd prioritize fixing these groups:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Checkout SendTo
Home
Account SignIn
Checkout OrderConfirmation
Category Browse 1

In other words, Conversion Impact Scoring answers this question:

how much impact does the performance of this page have on
conversions?

Now heres how some of these assumptions are incorrect:

CASE STUDY: HOW TO USE CONVERSION IMPACT

SCORING TO PRIORITIZE PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION

If you looked only at page load times, you might believe that you need
to prioritize the Checkout SendTo group because its performance
is dramatically poorer than the other groups. But if you knew its
Conversion Impact Score, youd realize that page speed doesnt
have much impact on conversion rate, so making this group faster
wouldnt be the best use of your limited optimization resources.

Now lets walk through how to use Conversion Impact Scores to

make decisions about optimizing your pages.
In the table below, you can see the Conversion Impact Scores
and load times for a set of page groups on a retail site. The second
column represents the Conversion Impact Score for each page
group, and the third column represents the median page load time
for each group. For a complete graph of these details, click here.
The groups are ranked from those with the highest Conversion
Impact Scores (such as product and category pages; in other words,
pages viewed in the browse phase of the conversion funnel) to
pages with the lowest scores (such as checkout and sign-in pages).

ASSUMPTION #1: PRIORITIZING THE CHECKOUT SENDTO PAGE

GROUP BECAUSE ITS THE SLOWEST

ASSUMPTION #2: TACKLING THE ACCOUNT SIGNIN PAGE GROUP NEXT

Also, if you were to look exclusively at load times, you might
believe that when youre done with optimizing the Checkout
SendTo group, you should focus next on addressing performance
issues on the Account SignIn group. While these pages have a
high enough Conversion Impact Score that they merit addressing,
they shouldnt rank high up on your list.

ASSUMPTION #3: NOT WORRYING ABOUT THE CATEGORY BROWSE 1 AND

PRODUCT DETAIL PAGE GROUPS BECAUSE THEY SEEM RELATIVELY FAST

PAGE GROUP

RELATIVE
CONVERSION IMPACT
SCORE

MEDIAN FULL
PAGE LOAD TIME
(SECONDS)

Product Detail Page

-0.12

2.9

Category Browse 1

-0.085

3.0

Home

-0.08

3.8

CONCLUSION

Choose Your Country

-0.045

2.1

Shopping Bag

-0.01

Knowing the Conversion Impact Scores for this set of page groups,
this is the order in which you might actually want to prioritize
their optimization to give you the best ROI:

Checkout Send To

-0.005

Wishlist

-0.004

2.8

Checkout Order
Confirmation

-0.003

3.2

Account SignIn

-0.0025

3.3

Some quick observations:

Some of the fastest page groupssuch as Shopping Bag and

Wishlisthave relatively low Conversion Impact Scores. This
means that page speed isnt a significant factor in how well these
pages convert.

47

The page groups with the highest Conversion Impact Scores

such as Product and Category pageshave acceptable load
times in the 3-second range.

Still looking solely at load times, you might also guess that, because
these pages look fairly speedy, you dont need to worry about them.
This is where youd make your biggest mistake. Because these
groups have the highest Conversion Impact Scores, they have the
potential to deliver the most benefit to you if you make them faster.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Home
Category Browse 1
Product Detail Page
Choose Your Country
Shopping Bag

As senior researcher and evangelist at SOASTA, TA M M Y E V E RTS

studies the technical, business, and human sides of web/application
performance and shares her findings via countless blog posts,
presentations, case studies, articles, and reports. She manages the
popular industry blog the Performance Beacon.

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Solutions Directory
This directory of monitoring, hosting, and optimization services provides comprehensive,
factual comparisons of data gathered from third-party sources and the tool creators
organizations. Solutions in the directory are selected based on several impartial criteria,
including solution maturity, technical innovativeness, relevance, and data availability.

48

PRODUCT NAME

PRODUCT TYPE

FREE TRIAL

HOSTING

WEBSITE

Akamai Ion

CDN, Network & Mobile Monitoring &

Optimization, FEO

Traffic (15TB) and other

limits

SaaS

akamai.com

Alertsite by Smartbear
Software

APM, Synthetic Monitoring,

Infrastructure Monitoring, Middleware
Monitoring

Available by request

On-premise
or SaaS

smartbear.com/product/alertsite/
overview/

Apica Systems

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring

Limited by usage

SaaS

apicasystems.com

AppDynamics

APM, Mobile and Web RUM, Database

Monitoring, Infrastructure Visibility

Free forever (Lite); 15day free trial (Pro)

On-premise
or SaaS

appdynamics.com

AppFirst

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, ITOA

30 days

SaaS

appfirst.com

AppNeta APM Platform

APM, Synthetic Monitoring, Network

Monitoring, ITOA, Real User Monitoring

Available by request

SaaS

appneta.com

AppNomic AppsOne

ITOA

Upon request

On-premise
or SaaS

appnomic.com

Aternity

APM, ITOA, Real User Monitoring

Upon request

On-premise

aternity.com

BigPanda

ITOA, Alert Software

21 days

SaaS

bigpanda.io

BMC TrueSight Pulse

APM, Network Monitoring, ITOA,

Database Monitoring

14 days

SaaS

bmc.com/it-solutions/truesight.
html

BrowserStack

FEO

Limited by usage

SaaS

browserstack.com

CA App Synthetic Monitor

APM, Synthetic Monitoring

Free Trial

SaaS

ca.com/us/products/ca-appsynthetic-monitor.html

CA Mobile App Analytics

Mobile APM

Free version available

SaaS

ca.com/us/products/ca-mobileapp-analytics.html

CA Unified Infrastructure
Management

Infrastructure Monitoring

Free Trial

On-premise

ca.com/us/products/ca-unifiedinfrastructure-management.html

Catchpoint Suite

Synthetic, RUM, UEM

14 days

On-premise
or SaaS

catchpoint.com/products/

Censum by jClarity

JVM Garbage Collection Optimization

7 days

SaaS w/
on-premise
option

jclarity.com

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PRODUCT NAME

PRODUCT TYPE

FREE TRIAL

HOSTING

WEBSITE

Circonus

Infrastructure Monitoring, ITOA

Free tier available

SaaS

circonus.com

CloudFlare

CDN, Network, Mobile, and Web

Monitoring and Optimization, FEO

Free tier available

CDN

cloudflare.com

Correlsense SharePath

APM, Network Monitoring, Middleware

Monitoring

Upon request

On-premise
or SaaS

correlsense.com

CoScale

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, ITOA,

Real User Monitoring

30 days

SaaS

coscale.com

Datadog

Performance Metrics Integration and

Analysis

14 days

SaaS

datadoghq.com

Dotcom Monitor

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, FEO

30 days

SaaS

dotcom-monitor.com

Dyn

Infrastructure Monitoring, Network

Monitoring, ITOA

7 days

On-premise

dyn.com

Dynatrace Application
Monitoring

APM, ITOA

30 days

On-premise

dynatrace.com/en/applicationmonitoring/

Dynatrace Data Center RUM

RUM (web and non-web), synthetic,

ITOA

Demo on request

On-premise

dynatrace.com/en/data-centerrum/

Dynatrace Ruxit

APM (cloud-native optimized) + AI

30 days / 1000 hours

On-premise
or SaaS

dynatrace.com/en/ruxit/

Dynatrace Synthetic

Synthetic monitoring, managed load

testing

Demo on request

SaaS

dynatrace.com/en/syntheticmonitoring/

Dynatrace UEM

Real user monitoring (web and mobile)

30 days

On-premise

dynatrace.com

eg Innovations Monitors

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, ITOA

14 days

SaaS

eginnovations.com

Evolven

ITOA

Upon request

On-premise

evolven.com

Extrahop Networks

ITOA

Free tier available

SaaS

extrahop.com

F5 Big IP Software

APM, Network Monitoring

30 days

On-premise
or SaaS

f5.com

Foglight by Dell

APM, Database Monitoring, RUM, ITOA

Available by request

On-premise

software.dell.com

Fusion Reactor

Java server monitor, production

debugging, crash protection

14 days

On-premise

fusion-reactor.com

HPE APM

APM, ITOA, Real User Monitoring

30 days

On-premise

hp.com

IBM API Connect

API Management Platform

Free tier available

On-premire
or SaaS

ibm.com/software/products/en/
api-connect

IBM Application Performance

Management

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, Real

User Monitoring

30 days

On-premise
or SaaS

ibm.com/software/products/en/
ibm-application-performancemanagement

Idera SQL Diagnostic Manager

DB monitoring

14 days

SaaS

idera.com

Idera UpTime Software

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring

14 days

SaaS

idera.com

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PRODUCT NAME

PRODUCT TYPE

FREE TRIAL

HOSTING

WEBSITE

Illuminate by jClarity

JVM Performance Diagnosis and

Optimization

14 days

SaaS w/
on-premise
option

jclarity.com

Impact by Cedexis

Infrastructure Monitoring, FEO, ITOA

Upon request

SaaS

cedexis.com

Inetco Insight

APM, Middleware Monitoring

Upon request

On-premise

inetco.com

Infovista 5view Applications

APM, Network Monitoring, Real User

Monitoring

Upon request

On-premise

infovista.com

JenniferSoft

APM

14 days

On-premise

jennifersoft.com

Keynote Platform by Dynatrace

Mobile APM (Synthetic Monitoring, Test

Automation)

7 days

SaaS

keynote.com

Librato

Performance Metrics Integration and

Analysis

30 days

SaaS

librato.com

Logentries

Log Management and Analytics

30 days; free tier

available

SaaS

logentries.com

Loggly

Log Management and Analytics

30 days

SaaS

loggly.com

LogMatrix NerveCenter

ITOA, APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring, Database
Monitoring

Available by request

On-premise

logmatrix.com

ManageEngine Applications
Manager

APM, Network Monitoring,

Infrastructure Monitoring

Available by request

On-premise

manageengine.com

Microsoft System Center 2012

APM

180 days

On-premise

microsoft.com

Moogsoft

Performance Metrics Integration,

Analysis, and Response

Available by request

On-premise
or SaaS

moogsoft.com

Nagios XI

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring, FEO, ITOA

Open source

On-premise

nagios.com

Nastel Autopilot

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, FEO,

Middleware Monitoring

Upon request

SaaS

nastel.com

NetScout nGeniusOne

APM, Network Monitoring, ITOA

Upon request

On-premise

netscout.com

Netuitive

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, ITOA

21 days

SaaS

netuitive.com

Neustar Website Monitoring

FEO

30 days

SaaS

neustar.biz

New Relic APM

APM, Database Monitoring, Availability

& Error Monitoring, Reports, Team
Collaboration, Security

Free tier availablel 14day Pro trial

SaaS

newrelic.com/applicationmonitoring

op5 Monitor

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring, FEO, ITOA

Free tier available

SaaS

op5.com

OpsGenie

Alert Software

Upon request

On-premise

opsgenie.com

OpsView

APM, Network Monitoring, ITOA

30 days

On-premise

opsview.com

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PRODUCT NAME

PRODUCT TYPE

FREE TRIAL

HOSTING

WEBSITE

PA Server Monitor

Infrastructure Monitoring, Network

Monitoring

30 days

On-premise

poweradmin.com

PagerDuty

ITOA, Alert Software

14 days

SaaS

pagerduty.com

Pingdom

APM, FEO

30 days

SaaS

pingdom.com

Rackspace Monitoring

Cloud monitoring

Included with cloud

account

SaaS

rackspace.com/cloud/monitoring

Riverbed SteelCentral

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring, ITOA

30-90 days

On-premise

riverbed.com

SauceLabs

FEO, Automated Web and Mobile

Testing

14 days

SaaS

saucelabs.com

ScienceLogic Platform

APM, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring

Upon request

SaaS

sciencelogic.com

SevOne

Infrastructure Monitoring, Network

Monitoring

Upon request

SaaS

sevone.com

SIEM by AccelOps

ITOA, Network Monitoring

30 days

SaaS

accelops.com

Site24x7 by ManageEngine

APM, FEO, Infrastructure Monitoring,

Network Monitoring

Limited by usage

SaaS

site24x7.com

Soasta Platform

Real User Monitoring, Load Testing

Up to 100 users

SaaS

soasta.com

Solarwinds Network
Performance Monitor

Network Monitoring, ITOA, Database

Monitoring, Log Management

30 days

On-premise

solarwinds.com

SpeedCurve

FEO, ITOA

None

SaaS

speedcurve.com

Spiceworks

Network Monitoring, ITOA

Free

On-premise

spiceworks.com

Stackify

APM, Network Monitoring, Database

Monitoring, ITOA

Upon request

SaaS

stackify.com

TeamQuest

ITOA

Upon request

On-premise

teamquest.com

Telerik Analytics

End-User Monitoring and Analytics

Free

On-premise

telerik.com

ThousandEyes

Network Monitoring, ITOA

15 days

SaaS

thousandeyes.com

TINGYUN App

APM, FEO, Real User Monitoring

Available by request

SaaS

tingyun.com

VictorOps

Alert Software

14 days

On-premise

victorops.com

Zabbix

Network Monitoring

Open source

On-premise

zabbix.com

Zenoss Service Dynamics

Infrastructure Monitoring, Network

Monitoring

Open source version

available

On-premise
or SaaS

zenoss.com

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DIVING DEEPER
INTO PERFORMANCE + MONITORING
TOP 10 #PERFORMANCE TWITTER FEEDS
@Souders

@brendangregg

@tameverts

@paul_irish

@bbinto

@mdaoudi

@ChrisLove

@firt

@Perf_Rocks

@duhroach

DZONE PERFORMANCE-RELATED ZONES

Performance Zone

DevOps Zone

Java Zone

dzone.com/performance

dzone.com/devops

dzone.com/java

Scalability and optimization are constant

concerns for the developer and operations
manager. The Performance Zone focuses on
all things performance, covering everything
from database optimization to garbage
collection, tool and technique comparisons,
and tweaks to keep your code as efficient
as possible.

DevOps is a cultural movement, supported by

exciting new tools, that is aimed at encouraging
close cooperation within cross-disciplinary
teams of developers and IT operations/system
admins. The DevOps Zone is your hot spot for
news and resources about Continuous Delivery,
Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, and much more.

The largest, most active Java developer

community on the web, with news and
tutorials on Java tools, performance tricks,
and new standards and strategies that
keep your skills razor sharp.

TOP PERFORMANCE
REFCARDZ
G E T T I N G S TA R T E D W I T H

Real User Monitoring

TOP SPEED
TEST TOOLS

Planet Performance

webpagetest.org

bit.ly/dz-userm

perfplanet.com

Java Performance Optimization

ResponsiveDesign.is

bit.ly/dz-javaperf

responsivedesign.is

Scalability & High Availability

Brendan Gregg's Blog

bit.ly/dz-scale

52

TOP PERFORMANCE
WEBSITES

tools.pingdom.com/fpt
developers.google.com/
speed/pagespeed/insights/

brendangregg.com/blog

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GLOSSARY
ACTIVE MONITORING Also known as
synthetic monitoring, this is a type of
website monitoring where scripts are
created to simulate an ordered series of
actions that an end-user might take (as
opposed to comparatively atomic functional
or integration tests). Tests overall site
functionality and response time and helps
identify any problems that hinder overall
site performance.
APPENDER In logging systems, specifies
destination, message format, behavior (non/
blocking, response timeouts, retry intervals,
exception handling), accept/reject filters,
compression details, etc.
APPLICATION-LAYER PROTOCOL
NEGOTIATION (ALPN) An extension of
Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol
negotiation that helps client and server
figure out, within the TLS handshake,
which application-layer protocols to use.
Handles HTTP/1.1 vs. HTTP/2 selection but
is also app-layer protocol indifferent.

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MONITORING

(APM) Combines metrics on all factors
that might affect application performance
(within an application and/or web server,
between database and application server,
on a single machine, between client and
server, etc.); usually (but not always) higherlevel than stack trace.

AVAILABLE PARALLELISM In terms of Big

O notation: work (relation between run steps
and input count) divided by depth (number
of branches in execution tree). Intuitively:
how much time we can save by running an
algorithm in parallel, discounted by the delay
introduced by splitting up the workload.

BIG-O NOTATION Describes the rate of

53

analogy to frames in link-layer protocols);

replaces human-readable header+body
in HTTP/1.1 request/response instances
(where headers are not compressed).

BOTTLENECK Occurs when an entire system

is slowed by one key component that has
reached capacity; the result is that nonbottlenecked system components waste
resources waiting.
CIRCUIT BREAKER A wrapper around a
resource to check the availability of that
resource and return an error message to
a requesting process if the resource is
unavailable; prevents cascading failures
(e.g., if additional resources are waiting
on a requesting resource that receives an
'unavailable' message, then the requesting
resource can enter fallback mode).
CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN)
Geographically and topologically distributed
servers that cache content (often highbandwidth static content, like videos,
documents, or other large binaries) to
minimize unnecessary transport and
backbone overload.

CONVERSION FUNNEL A start-to-finish path

that a user follows when they convert from
looking/browsing to downloading or making
a purchase.

CONVERSION IMPACT SCORE A measure

of how much something (e.g., a page load
time increase of 500ms) affects conversion
(see above).
DESIGN PATTERN A reusable solution to
commonly recurring problem; more abstract
than a best practice, more concrete than a
design principle (object-oriented examples:
Iterator, Factory, Observer).

FLAW OF AVERAGES A phrase coined by

statistician Sam Savage to capture the
notion that serious misrepresentation of
data often occurs when averages are used
to represent uncertain outcomes.

change in runtime steps required by an

algorithm given a specified change in input
count. Used to capture efficiency of an
algorithm. O(n) will scale linearly, O(n2) will
become quadratically slower, and O(1) will
not lose any efficiency over time.

memory management; the process of

reclaiming the memory reserved for objects
that are no longer in use.

BINARY FRAMES The basic unit of

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATOR (KPI) A

communication in HTTP/2 (constructed by

set of indicators to measure data or

GARBAGE COLLECTION A part of automatic

performance against a particular set of

standards or requirements

LATENCY The time delay between an input

and the desired output in a software system.
MICROSERVICES An application
deployment model consisting of small,
loosely coupled services that each perform
a single function according to the domains
bounded contexts; sometimes seen as SOA
done right, or another version of the UNIX
philosophy.
MULTIPLEXING A method used to
send more than one message or data
stream (which in practice often means
bidirectionally) in the form of one complex
signal over a single link.
RECURSIVE FUNCTION A system of solving
a problem in which the solution depends
on breaking down the problem and solving
smaller instances of it. This function can
keep looping back to the beginning of itself
until all the problems are solved.

SERVER PUSH A method of information

delivery on the Web that is originated by
the publisher/information server versus the
client/information user (the usual process).

THREAD POOL A number of threads

reserved in advance; avoids ad-hoc task
creation overhead, thread-linked spinup expense (e.g., if stopping a thread
would require closing a socket that will be
reopened soon), and resource bottlenecks
caused by OS resource management.
THROTTLING A mechanism to deliberately
regulate the rate at which data is
transferred or processed.
TRANSPORT LAYER SECURITY (TLS) A
protocol designed to protect the privacy
between communicating applications
and their users on the Internet. Usually
considered to deprecate SSL v3.0 (which
has serious vulnerabilities).
USER DATAGRAM PROTOCOL (UDP) A
lightweight, connectionless alternative to
TCP, this is a messaging protocol in which
computer applications can send messages
across an IP network without needing prior
communication to set up data paths. It is
also used to set up loss-tolerating and lowlatency internet application connections.

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