The saying “if it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist“1 is reigning truer every day. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine most businesses without an e-commerce platform, let alone without a web presence at all. Since e-commerce is becoming the new standard, e-commerce performance needs to be at its best. In this [...]

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 [...]

A question that every online application provider will face eventually is: does my application scale? Can I add an extra 100 users and still ensure the same user experience? If the application architecture is properly designed the easiest way is to put additional server behind load balancer to handle more traffic. In this article we [...]

When we set up our application performance monitoring tool to correctly notify us about unexpected performance degradation, we often know about problems before our users start making calls to support (see our previous post on proactive APM). But what happens when we actually learn about a major performance outage? Psychologists identified two ways people falter [...]

As much as we try to avoid performance problems, they do happen. It is inevitable. But it is possible to learn to react fast; and in some occasions fast enough that the impact on the end users is negligible. Despite operators’ best efforts, 73% of performance issues are reported by users, according to "APM: Getting [...]

Bon-Ton operates 273 stores in 23 states of the US and offers online shopping through fifteen active WebSphere application servers hosted in two eCommerce data centers. 85% of its online eCommerce content is served through Akamai which is smart and necessary in order to serve the 25 million requests they see on their web site [...]

A couple of weeks ago we helped a customer get more visibility into his production environment with Compuware dynaTrace. He was already using it in other environments, so he knew what he was getting. Anyway, a couple of hours later I read a tweet from him: “Just hooked up dynaTrace. Can’t wait for tomorrows traffic [...]

“I’m looking to drop some serious cash on cookware, but I can’t add items to my cart” – this is a comment posted by a frustrated visitor of one of the Bon-Ton Online Stores. The question is what you do with that type of comment when you are responsible for End User Experience? Is it [...]

Swarovski – the leading producer of cut crystal in the world- relies on its eCommerce store as much like other companies in the highly competitive eCommerce environment. Swarovski’s story is no different from others in this space: They started with “Let’s build a website to sell our products online” a couple of years ago and [...]

Anyone that ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real world example outside of the performance space that I [...]