{"id":890,"date":"2011-01-17T18:35:16","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T17:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.eweibel.net\/?p=890"},"modified":"2011-01-17T18:35:16","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T17:35:16","slug":"hunting-performance-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.eweibel.net\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"Hunting performance issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"<\/a>Recently I received the lead over a performance optimization project for a software product.  It isn’t something extraordinary for a software architect, because as a software architect you have to know what’s critical for a software system in a specific environment.
Some of my co-workers may now smile a bit: I always say that you shouldn’t by default design your software based on performance considerations. The code should be simple, understandable and correct. My thesis was and is "good code is fast code". With this new job I have the chance to proof this thesis.
So I started to plan my work and tried to achieve a performance improvement of the related software. This blog post is a temporary r\u00e9sum\u00e9 what I learned so far.<\/p>\n

Feedback from the users of the software<\/strong>
My first task was to visit the users and talk with them about where they think exactly the performance problems are. As expected the feedback was quite on a high level of abstraction. They told me where in the processes the software seems to be slow. The feedback was, as expected, subjective and also colored by the business of the customer. Not all customers use the software the same way or use the same set of features. But after an analysis of log files and other resources I could, in many times, prove the customer feedback.<\/p>\n

Feedback from the IT departments<\/strong>
I received not only feedback from the users, there was also feedback from system administrators as well. And this feedback was sometimes a little bit scary: 100% CPU usage over several minutes, heavy use of RAM. The only thing what a system administrator can do in such a situation is to ask the users if he could reset the IIS or reboot the server. At this point every software developer understands why performance is important. It isn’t only about money, it is also about customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Tools<\/strong>
When you have to improve your software performance, then you need facts. Those facts can be log entries, code smells or discovered facts by dynamic code analysis tools. In the software which I have to improve, there was a log, but the components of the software didn’t log very performance specific. So I was more or less blind. This was the reason why I began to evaluate profiling software. At the end there were two profilers: JetBrains dotTrace<\/a> and Red Gate ANTS Profiler<\/a>. I chose the Red Gate profiler because I found the UI and the presented information a bit better. So, the current tools I use are:<\/p>\n