As a reaction of the last post I got the question by Oswaldo about specific recommendations on performance. Actually, there are a lot. But that’s material for another blog post 🙂 or skip to the bottom of this post.
Instead I want to give you a recommendation on how to handle situations when you did not have time nor capacity you can spend on thinking about performance and response times. But as an experienced technical leader you know that at some point this question will arise for sure. You might get a few hours to spend on that question, but how do you spend it most efficiently?
Clearly not for performance optimization! Because it’s not enough time to analyze and improve substantial parts of the application. And tomorrows changes might render these improvements useless…
Instead I would recommend you to spend this time in communication and building rapport with people who can help you in case such a performance problem arises. Get in contact with the operations people which are operating your system and application. Understand how they work and what tools they use. Understand how they can help you in case of performance issues, what information they can provide to you. Ask for an account on their monitoring system, just to demonstrate interest in their work and problems. And potentially give them some tips what they can additionally do to improve the quality of the information (for example asking if they can also provide the raw data and not only the visualization based on aggregated data). Or show them some hints how they improve their work with your application.
The biggest value in that activity is the fact, that in case the dreaded performance issue is noticed on an exec level, you already know who to talk to. You know a bit how the others are working and how you can help them. As a tech lead it’s then much easier to ask for logfiles, traffic patterns, CPU usage graphs and I/O latencies, threaddumps etc. You know upfront what information it operations already collects by default. You might have direct access to a monitoring system to get more information. You can even get a warning from the ops people in advance that some real big escalation is imminent. For me this is the best you can get if you have just a few hours to spend.
You might ask why is that important. Because it reduces the TTAD (time to actionable data) dramatically in case of such performance issues. You know who to get on the phone and into calls to start investigation. You already know what information is already available or you can even access it directly. You can report “We are analyzing data and can come up with first suggestions within the day” instead of “we are talking to IT and see how they can support us to get data”.
That’s much more important than spending some hours on random performance tuning. And in case you ever run into performance issues, these hours are one of the best investment you made in the whole project.
(And as random recommendation to improve AEM request rendering times: Disable the MobileRedirectFilter (PID: com.day.cq.wcm.mobile.core.impl.redirect.RedirectFilter) by setting the configuration parameter “redirect.enabled” to “false”. In the age of responsive websites it’s purpose is no longer given. And under load its performance impact can be significant.)
Things on a content management system 