Performance Tuning

During what stage of the development cycle we start performance tuning? How much time are we spending to tune application that’s in Production or in UAT?

One comment I heard from even from a Enterprise Architect was, “I know those are important, but my boss says get me the functionality first, other “lities” can come later”. The “lities” include scalability, maintainability etc and performance as well.

I like to politely disagree to him. But this is what most the project goes through. Due to business compulsions or time lines we build the system and later spend sleepless nights in fixing the performance bottle necks.

In most of the Enterprise Java application development performance tuning starts late in the development cycle. We start worrying about performance in the UAT phase or even after production when performance becomes critical.

Performance is as important as any functionality we build. Why are we not investing time on the early stages of development?

Tuning an application; most people sees it only as SQL Query tuning. I agree that is important, but that is not all. Tuning is required in design, presentation layer, and UI components as well. Even some incorrect business requirement could lead to performance bottle necks.

In one of the project the database returned result is 1 minute but the screen rendering took 10 minutes for huge record sets. The issue was with a JSF UI component which displayed the result in table format and due to a wrong Java script implementation in that page. When component rendering was changed from the conventional <table>,<tr>,<td> to <div><span> the results were still encouraging.

What I suggest is performance tuning or performance; engineering track should cut across all stages of development life cycle from Functional Specification, Design, and Coding. As we progress in building system we should go back often tune where ever required. Make sure the application is tested with quality and quantity data.

Early Alarm makes life easy. Performance tuning; “Start Early, Do it regularly!!!”

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