- Any personal experience in overcoming web application performance hurdles?
- Any recommended strategies for improving the performance of a data-driven web application?
My development team works on a web application (JSP reports, HTML, JavaScript) that uses an Oracle database (PL/SQL). The key functionality the application delivers is in reporting, where a user can get PDFs of reports at a high level and drill down to lower levels of supporting details.
As the number of supporting detail records has grown into the millions, the performance of the system has significantly degraded. Based on our current analysis of the metrics, the bottleneck seems to be in the logic hitting the DB and the DB performance. Changing the DB model and re-doing some of the server side logic is currently being explored.
Partioning, indexing, explain plans, and running statistics are things that have been done on the DB side to try to help improve performance. While they’ve helped, they haven’t solved the issue satisfactorily. The toughest part in analyzing performance data is that the database and web servers are remotely administered by a different part of the IT organization, so the developers don’t have regular, full access to see what’s going on (especially in the production environment, which is not mirrored exactly in any other development/testing environment).
While my answer may not contain any concrete steps to help this is always where I start.
First thing I would do is try to throw away all of your assumptions about what the trouble is and take steps to install metrics everywhere you can. Let the metrics guide you rather than your intuition. I’ve chased many, many, many white rabbits going on a hunch…the let me down more times than they’ve been right.