System Performance Engineering Methodology (SPEM) is a step-by-step framework to benchmark performance, identify bottlenecks, and analyze performance trends to proactively address issues. It is required because systems see increasing functionality and workloads over time, making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of performance problems without a structured approach. SPEM can be implemented proactively through careful system design and testing or reactively by gathering diagnostic information, analyzing it to identify the bottleneck, and implementing remedies.

1. System Performance Engineering
Methodology (SPEM)
by Ankit Rathi
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

2. Agenda
• SPEM Background
• What is SPEM?
• Why SPEM is required?
• Types of SPEM
• How SPEM is implemented?
• Who are SPEM stakeholders?
• Performance Benchmarking Tools
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

3. SPEM Background
• Overnight batch was breaching SLA on regular
basis
• Unable to identify the bottleneck
• Analyzed the whole batch
• Completed critical path analysis
• Identified candidates for tuning
• Based on trail & error
• No structured approach
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

4. What is SPEM?
• Step-by-step framework
• To benchmark the performance
• To identify the current bottlenecks
• To analyze performance trend
• To proactively anticipate performance issues
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

5. Some Basics
• Bottleneck
• Throughput
• Response Time
• Scalability
• Performance Baseline
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

6. Why SPEM is required?
• More & more functionality day by day
• Increasing workload on the systems (more
data, more users)
• Inability to identify root-cause & fix
• No logically structured way to deal with
performance issues
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

7. Performance Baselines
• Application statistics (transaction volumes,
response time)
• Database statistics (DB time, Wait time)
• Operating System statistics (CPU utilization)
• Disk I/O statistics (disk usage, read/write)
• Network statistics (data packets, sockets,
interfaces)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

8. What are the types of SPEM?
• Proactive methodology: analysis, design,
development and test phases
• Reactive methodology: identifying the primary
bottleneck
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

9. How SPEM is implemented?
Proactive Approach
• Simple database & application design
• Instrumenting system performance measures
• Avoiding common oversights in system
architecture
• Caching frequently accessed data
• Workload testing, modeling and
implementation
• Proactive performance stats capture
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

10. How SPEM is implemented?
Reactive Approach
• Get and accurate description of the problem
• Gather application/database/OS/Network stats
• Check for common pitfalls
• Analyze the stats gather, theorize the cause of
the problem
• Propose the remedial actions, then implement
them
• Repeat any steps, as required, until performance
goals are met
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

11. Who are SPEM Stakeholders?
• Business Analysts (gather/analyse
performance requirements)
• System Architects/Designers (design for
performance)
• Developers (code for performance)
• Testers (test for performance)
• Analysts (tune for performance)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013

12. Performance Benchmarking Tools
• Tools in Oracle: AWR/Statspack, Explain Plan,
SQL Trace/TKPROF
• Tools in Java: JRockit, JProfiler
• Tools in .NET: PerfView, GlowCode
• Tools for OS: GlowCode (Windows), gProf
(UNIX/Linux)
http://ankitrathi.co.nr © 2013