GAPP Performance Method at HOTSOS 2009

For some months ago (october 2008) I wrote an abstract for a paper to present at the HOTSOS 2009 symposium. Although I hoped I was selected to give the presentation, I was not selected by Hotsos. This was a pitty but looking at the people and the presentations who made it to the agenda of the HOTSOS 2009 symposium, it would have been very special to be there also. Due to the high quality of the sysmposium and the fact that it is the place to be for every performance geek out there, I planned together with my collegae Marco Gralike a trip to the symposium this year only as an attendee.

Last week I received unexpectedly an email from Cary Millsap with a very special opportunity within. Cary asked me if I was still interested in presenting at the comming symposium and although very little time I said of course YES. So although late I was added to the HOTSOS 2009 symposium agenda to give a presentation called “Practical Use of Method Gapp to Find Performance Bottlenecks for Business Processes in Complex Architectures”

I hope personal that I will give a presentation wich will be equally or even more interresting than the one I gave at the HOTSOS Symposium 2008. As a last word I really like to thank Cary Millsap for this opportunity.

Regards, Gerwin

Dr. N.J. Gunther Receives A.A. Michelson Award

Dr. N.J. Gunther has received at the annual CMG International Conference in Las Vegas last week the A.A. Michelson Award. Dr. Neil Gunther was the recipient of the prestigious A.A. Michelson Award; the industry’s highest honor for computer performance analysis and capacity planning. As he said in his acceptance speech, it was the fulfillment of a dream he had entertained at his first CMG Conference in 1993.

I really like to congratulate Dr. Neil Gunther with this very big achievement. For further reading you can check out the blog post from Dr. Neil Gunther on his website. Don’t forget to check out the speech presentation with at the end a nice picture of Dr. Neil Gunther and his father.

GAPP and practice, a personal touch…

It is now almost a year ago I came up with the name GAPP to promote my method “General Approach Performance Profiling”. The last couple of months I have been very busy to use the method in practice and was able to fine tune the way to gather data and do the analysis quicker and quicker.

The power of the method comes to its full exposure in situations that a lot of servers are involved and the business process are very hard to be traced in any way. The latest customer I helped with the method had a system with a hardware loadbalancer, 8 application servers, 2 database servers running 30 databases each and a NETAPP storage. In this situation I was able to pinpoint that problems in the garbage collection on the application servers was there mean issue and a second important issue was residing on a synchronization process on the NETAPP.

The used data mining made it possible to find relations in the data, which are very hard to be determined without extensive tracing. Also the capabilities of data mining to predict with a model future bottlenecks, make GAPP very powerfull. Although it is probably a pitty to tell, I had still not the time to finish my whitepaper. There is a version, but is still beta and should be more professional and enriched with more information about the practical use of the method. For now I have put it online, but be aware it is very beta.

I hope I will from this moment on, not again let you wait to get some new content on this blog.

Regards, Gerwin