Applying Performance

This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that. Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to: Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs) Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises. "Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience."-- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne

Pro PHP Application Performance will help you understand all the technologies and components which play a role in how well your applications run. When seconds can mean the difference between retaining a user and losing a user, it's important for all of us to have optimization as part of our project roadmap. But what components within your application should you analyze? How should you optimize? And how can you measure how well your application is performing? These are some of the questions that are answered in this book. Along the way you will also learn the "why" of optimizing. You’ll discover why you should optimize a specific component, why selecting one function over another is beneficial, and how to find and use the optimization tools available to the open source community. You’ll also learn how to deploy caching software as well as web server software. Pro PHP Application Performance will also teach you more advanced techniques, such as: • Using Xdebug to profile functions that are not running as efficiently as possible. • Comparing opcode executed by different PHP functions to narrow the search for functions that run efficiently. • Using strace to analyze Apache while your application is served to the user. Once you complete this book you will have a complete sense of where to start optimizing and, most importantly, have the tools which allow you to continue optimizing in other PHP applications going forward.

Application Performance Management (APM) in the Digital Enterprise enables IT professionals to be more successful in managing their company’s applications. It explores the fundamentals of application management, examines how the latest technological trends impact application management, and provides best practices for responding to these changes. The recent surge in the use of containers as a way to simplify management and deploy applications has created new challenges, and the convergence of containerization, cloud, mobile, virtualization, analytics, and automation is reshaping the requirements for application management. This book serves as a guide for understanding these dramatic changes and how they impact the management of applications, showing how to create a management strategy, define the underlying processes and standards, and how to select the appropriate tools to enable management processes. Offers a complete framework for implementing effective application management using clear tips and solutions for those responsible for application management Draws upon primary research to give technologists a current understanding of the latest technologies and processes needed to more effectively manage large-scale applications Includes real-world case studies and business justifications that support application management investments

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

Use BPF Tools to Optimize Performance, Fix Problems, and See Inside Running Systems BPF-based performance tools give you unprecedented visibility into systems and applications, so you can optimize performance, troubleshoot code, strengthen security, and reduce costs. BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability is the definitive guide to using these tools for observability. Pioneering BPF expert Brendan Gregg presents more than 150 ready-to-run analysis and debugging tools, expert guidance on applying them, and step-by-step tutorials on developing your own. You’ll learn how to analyze CPUs, memory, disks, file systems, networking, languages, applications, containers, hypervisors, security, and the kernel. Gregg guides you from basic to advanced tools, helping you generate deeper, more useful technical insights for improving virtually any Linux system or application. • Learn essential tracing concepts and both core BPF front-ends: BCC and bpftrace • Master 150+ powerful BPF tools, including dozens created just for this book, and available for download • Discover practical strategies, tips, and tricks for more effective analysis • Analyze compiled, JIT-compiled, and interpreted code in multiple languages: C, Java, bash shell, and more • Generate metrics, stack traces, and custom latency histograms • Use complementary tools when they offer quick, easy wins • Explore advanced tools built on BPF: PCP and Grafana for remote monitoring, eBPF Exporter, and kubectl-trace for tracing Kubernetes • Foreword by Alexei Starovoitov, creator of the new BPF BPF Performance Tools will be an indispensable resource for all administrators, developers, support staff, and other IT professionals working with any recent Linux distribution in any enterprise or cloud environment.

Because performance is paramount today, this thoroughly updated guide shows you how to test mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before you deploy them—whether it’s to the cloud or a mobile device. You’ll learn the complete testing process lifecycle step-by-step, along with best practices to plan, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Understand the importance of End User Monitoring (EUM) Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web applications, and web services Recognize and resolves issues often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with over 15 years’ experience with performance testing, The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises.