Tech Note

Why does everyone talk about Jennifer? Out of many Java application monitoring solutions in existence, the reason why Jennifer stands out is because it utilizes its own unique and revolutionary concept. Jennifer, created by the field engineers with years of performance tuning experience, has something that no other solutions have.

System performance optimization is to make the system perform at an optimum state with the limited assigned resources. For maximum performance with given resource, every performance bottleneck has to be eliminated except for the system resources (CPU, MEM, NET, etc.). The system resources (except for improper use of resources) are no longer an issue as it can be resolved by simply adding more of it. Performance obstacles refer to the condition when the service is not possible for any reason including system failure due to bugs. System optimization generally includes “tuning” for maximizing the amount of process as well as removing performance obstacle and others.

When coding with Java, the developers typically do not manage the memory usage themselves; JVM manages the memory on its own. This is a concept that was non-existent in C/C++ and brought a lot of excitement among developers, playing an critical role in Java language’s rising popularity all over the world. But despite its revolutionary concept, memory problems still occur in Java. Though not as frequently as C/C++, OutOfMemoryError is occasionally encountered, causing headaches for many administrators and developers.

In Web Application Server, service response time can be expressed as measurement of customer satisfaction. Even if there exist some bugs in a system, if the bug does not cause any problem in service response time or site’s functionality, it cannot be seen as a problem. As such, even if there is no bug found in the system, if the service response time is not fast enough to fulfill customer satisfaction, the system itself has a problem and cannot be considered normal. Service response time is an important information source in measuring system’s stability and diagnosing system problems. Following documentation describes using service response time to resolve system performance issues and why monitoring the system resource alone is not correct the approach.

So, How do you widen the funnel stem in context of WAS administration? Widening the funnel stem means improving application’s overall ability to process the incoming requests. the stem of the funnel can be expressed as the bottle neck of the system. For example, if the DB is experiencing performance problem and it cannot provide data to the application fast enough, then DB is the bottleneck of the system. While DB sends and receives data, other components that are not experiencing performance issue have to wait for their turn to be serviced by the DB, causing increase in service response time. To improve response timel, the bottleneck must be removed. Solution can be tuning inefficient query or upgrading to faster DB hardware etc...