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 [...]

SharePoint is a popular choice for intranet applications and therefore it is important that it performs well to ensure employee productivity. Waiting ten seconds just to load the initial dashboard doesn’t necessarily support that. At a recent customer engagement we identified an interesting source of a potential performance problem that impacts ALL SharePoint and .NET-based [...]

“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 [...]

Does your application architecture include Message Queues to feed work items to backend batch processing such as “Update Product Inventory” or “Send out Notification Emails”? Message Queues work well in these use cases as they decouple your system components and allow your backend processing to asynchronously process requests. This decoupling allows the queue to grow [...]

Most organizations are dealing with a diverse IT landscape today. And so does one of our customers, a large American bank, which needs to handle a 10+ year old Visual Basic 6 (VB6) application that got integrated into their modern .NET enterprise application. In this blog post I describe how we managed to get insight [...]

If you are an IT manager, application owner, architect or developer in a corporation leveraging a mainframe, then today is a revolutionary day: Application Performance Management is now available end-to-end for the mainframe. Read about how this will drastically change the way we manage developing, refining, testing and bug-fixing applications involving a mainframe. The Pain [...]

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 [...]

Are you the one to decide on implementing your next project based on public cloud platforms such as Windows Azure? Is it going to be HTML5, Flash or Silverlight for your rich end user interface? Have you thought about the costs running on cloud services that seem cheaper than hosting on your own hardware? What [...]

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 [...]

I have been working with performance sensitive applications for a long time now. As can be expected most of them have to use the database at one point or the other. So you inevitably end up having a connection pool. Now to make sure that your application is not suffering from waiting on connections you [...]