Adding more memory to your JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) might be a temporary solution to fixing memory leaks in Java applications, but it for sure won’t fix the root cause of the issue. Instead of crashing once per day it may just crash every other day. “Preventive” restarts are also just another desperate measure to [...]

The other day I ran a Pig script. Nothing fancy; I loaded some data into HBase and then ran a second Pig job to do some aggregations. I knew the data loading would take some time as it was multiple GB of data, but I expected the second aggregation job to run much faster. It [...]

The other day I was looking at a web application that was using MongoDB as its central database. We were analyzing the application for potential performance problems and inside 5 minutes I detected what I must consider to be a MongoDB anti pattern and had a 40% impact on response time. The funny thing: It [...]

An eCommerce site that crashes 7 times during the Christmas season, being down for up to five hours each time it crashes is a site that loses a lot of money and suffers reputation damage. It happened to one of our customers, before we started working with them. They shared their story and what they [...]

Does the following situation sound familiar? From one minute to the other, your production servers grind to a halt, terse emails are complemented by equally hectic phone calls, and the first order of business is to get back up and running. After the dust settles, you’re usually left with a pile of log files and [...]

Traditional Enterprise Database vendors often bring up the lack of professional monitoring and management tool support for NoSQL solutions. Their argument is that enterprise applications require sophisticated tuning and monitoring of the database in order to ensure a performant and smooth operation. NoSQL Vendors, while arguing that this lack is not enough to favor RDBMS [...]

Ten years ago, the main goal for managers in network operations was to ensure the network was simply up and running. Today a well performing network does not guarantee that critical business applications are being successfully delivered to users. The reality for IT and operations is dealing with requests for faster, always available applications and [...]

Thinking cloud is thinking application-centric. Organizations utilize public cloud offerings because they want to focus on their revenue-generating applications rather than managing infrastructure. And from there we already can draw the significance of Application Performance Management (APM) in public cloud environments. If we focus on our application, a focus on its performance is essential. Even [...]

Obviously, cloud computing is not just a fancy trend anymore. Quite a few SaaS offerings are already built on platforms like Windows Azure. Others use Amazon’s EC2 to host their complete infrastructure or at least use it for additional resources to handle peak load or do “number-crunching”. Many also end up with a hybrid approach [...]

Some time back I planned to publish a series about java memory problems. It took me longer than originally planned, but here is the second installment. In the first part I talked about the different causes for memory leaks, but memory leaks are by far not the only issue around java memory management. Edit: A [...]