Application Workload Analysis

Consulting

"Make sure that the hardware (or cloud resource) is optimal for your application's workload."

If you’re like most of the corporate world, you have an application or two with a reputation for terrible performance, a true enigma for its user community!

Unless you have staff that can investigate and fix the software, sometimes there is not much you can do to remedy this problem. Perhaps IT tried to fix the problem by updating the application’s infrastructure with new and improved hardware, but it didn’t help.

We offer a careful analysis of the application workload which can often reveal a gold nugget about how to improve performance.

A methodical investigation is used to measure the resources (CPU, RAM, disk I/O, network I/O) used by all components of the software. Thereafter, determination is made as to whether the database server, web server, application back-end or application front-end (or a combination of them) is causing the performance issue. If available, a database trace or web server trace may be employed to find out what SQL statements are crunching the most resources.

Depending on the state of the software, whether source code is available, and whether or not modifications are allowed to the application/database, we may offer one or more of the following options:

pinpoint faulty application or service code and offer corrections
suggest improvement to the database code
build or remove database indexes
recommend hardware specific changes tailored to the needs of the workload. For example, after analyzing a slow, CPU intensive, application running on a server with a large number of relatively slow CPU cores, it was determined that the app needed a server with a small number of cores but a very fast clock speed.