[PJUG Javamail] Measuring webapp performance

[Joe Hoffman]

Merlyn,

Measuring webapp performance can come in lots of flavors.  Blackbox,  
whitebox, etc.
I guess is probably depends on whether you need to dig into the  
details of why something is performing the way it is, or is it simply  
sufficient to measure the blackbox response time of the web request  
itself.

Along the lines of shameless plugs, and if you have the need to dig  
into the transaction itself and get to the root cause of the  
performance issues, you may want to consider a commercial tool such as  
dynaTrace.

One thing to always be careful of, is anytime you plug in a monitoring  
capability (whether commercial, home grown, FOSS, etc),  the  
Heisenberg uncertainty principal comes into play. This simply means  
that we want to use the least impacting monitoring technique to  
accomplish the level of information collection we need.   This must be  
balanced with the requirement to be able to actually solve performance  
issues and not just 'watch' them.  Lots of tools can watch and  
measure, but is that sufficient for your webapp performance needs?

Hope that helps.

Disclaimer:  The size of the burrito I eat for lunch is subsidized by  
sales of dynaTrace products.

joe

On Jan 17, 2009, at 2:08 PM, Merlyn Albery-Speyer wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> How are people going about measuring the performance of their webapps?
> I've considered a servlet filter to write HTTP request durations to a
> log file. What I'd really like is some live comparative measure of
> overall performance. I could dive in and come up with yet another
> custom solution to this problem, however it seems wiser to poll for
> your opinion. Do you know of a suitable existing tool or library?
>
> Cheers,
> Merlyn
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