Alois Reitbauer

When building distributed applications one of the central performance-critical components is serialization. Most modern frameworks make it very easy to send data over the wire. In many cases you don’t see at all what is going on behind the scenes. Choosing the right serialization strategy however is central for achieving good performance and scalability. Serialization problems affect CPU, memory, network load and response times. Java provides us with a large variety of serialization technologies. The actual amount of data which is sent over the wire can vary substantially. We will use a very simple sample where we send the firstname, lastname and birthdate over the wire. Then we’ll see how big the actual payload gets. Binary Data As a reference we start by sending only the payload. This is the most efficient way of sending data, as there is no overhead involved. The d... (more)

Performance Considerations in Distributed Applications

Java Developer Magazine on Ulitzer Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. During development these problems often do not surface.  Then suddenly in load testing or production you might then realize that your chosen software architecture does not support the required performance and scalability requirements. In this post we will look at major... (more)

Application Performance Almanac 2010

2010 is over and there has been a lot going on in the application performance space.  We started this project at the beginning of the year inspired by Stoyan Stefanov’s   performance advent calendar of 2009. (There is also one for 2010). Now twelve months later we have our 2010 performance almanac available. According to Wikipedia an almanac is -”… an annual publication containing information in a particular field”. Our performance almanac contains nearly 50 articles of numerous topics around application performance. We hope that there are topics for everybody. The articles ra... (more)

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases

In my last article I discussed benchmarking as the first use case for Web Performance Optimization (WPO). This time I will take a closer look at optimization. After we have discovered how our site behaves compared to our competition – or any reference we might want to benchmark against – we want to learn how to improve our user experience. We will therefore have a look at different approaches towards optimization. Best-Practice-Based Optimization Fortunately there are lots of best practices on how to optimize the performance of web applications. Yahoo and Google - and also dynaTr... (more)

Web Performance Optimization Use Cases - Part 4

In this edition of our WPO Use Case series I discuss another very important use case. Load Time Optimization is most likely the most vital use case from an end user perspective. At the same time it is also highly important from a business perspective as studies by ShopZilla or Google and Bing show that load times have immediate effects on user behavior. The higher the load, the less end users are interested in interacting with the page. Load time therefore has a direct relationship to user acceptance and also business goals. The goal of optimizing load times is to show relevant ... (more)