Chapter 12. The Art of Performance Tuning

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Building an application is one thing. Expecting it to perform flawlessly from the get-go is quite another. No applications I have developed or come across have demonstrated acceptable performance out of the gate. The complementary disciplines of performance testing and performance tuning must come into play. Performance testing is the process of generating reliable and consistent performance statistics for an application. Contrary to what you might think, performance testing is not about just getting simple performance statistics. It is about generating a performance profile for a wide range of user loads. Performance tuning is the process of using that information to divine the root cause of any performance deficiencies.

This chapter focuses on the performance issues you're likely to encounter with your applications and the process you need to go through to solve the problems. Unlike Chapter 11, which simply listed specific performance issues and recommendations, this chapter is all about locating the cause(s) of problems in your applications.

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