Sreekanth Makam S - Symphony Services Corp( India) Pvt Ltd.
Root Cause Analysis for CPU Performance Bottlenecks
Monitoring and managing Internet applications is a key to a successful business. When customers use J2EE Internet applications to conduct business online it is imperative that they go through a smooth and timely experience. Customer business is changing rapidly day to day. Businesses are stretched to meet very high, unexpected loads where current applications fail to meet the expected performance. The applications start working very slow which adversely affect the customer business. This specially applies to applications with performance problems under the production environment, which affect the entire business.
More than 60% of performance problems can be attributed to CPU bottlenecks. This white paper concentrates on finding and tuning CPU bottlenecks.
CPU Bottlenecks can be mainly categorized in two ways:
- Very high CPU utilizations
- Very low CPU Utilization
Troubleshooting J2EE applications to find CPU performance bottlenecks and isolate the performance problems involves a lot of guesswork, making it a very cumbersome, slow and tedious process. Getting to the root of CPU performance problems in the complex, distributed, and dynamic J2EE environment is truly a challenge.
There is no single solution or single path that can be followed when it come to performance tuning. The whole of performance tuning is based on the 20:80 rule where tuning 20%, 80% performance can be archived. This is a well know rule which is almost true in every case.
The first question that arises here is: where is that 20%? Is it the system, the loads, the configuration, etc? This analysis is known as Root Cause Analysis.
This paper also addresses some of the misconceptions regarding CPU performance issues.
Sreekanth Makam S is a Senior Performance Engineer working at Symphony Services. Prior to Symphony Services, Sreekanth worked as a Software designer in Hewlett-Packard, India.
He has spent more than 3 years in the Performance Management of various products in different domains such as logistics and CRM. His experiences include Capacity planning, Benchmarking, Performance monitoring and tuning, and Platform study of various set of applications. He has vast experience in the various tools and technologies used in Performance management of J2EE applications.
He holds a B.E. degree in Computer Sciences from Visweswaraiah Technological University, Belgaum.