Chapter 9

Data Access Performance Tuning

   

Imagine that your new application — running since implementation without a hitch — begins to exhibit signs of stress. At first, a few users occasionally complain about slow response times. Within a few weeks, at certain times of the day, some user requests are simply blocked and not getting through. Then suddenly your application is "too busy" and it hangs. In this scenario, although the application worked for a while, the increased workload growth initially caused poor performance and finally initiated catastrophic collapse. What went wrong — and how to avoid it — involves many architectural design and implementation choices across the application's entire deployment infrastructure.

As your enterprise application changes over time, it must handle more users, heavier transaction workloads, increased network traffic, and larger, more complex databases. Data access throughput becomes a primary concern because each increase in the workload requires additional computer and network resources.

The foundation of high-performance data access includes good architectural design, sufficient hardware resources, and optimized database retrieval algorithms. Vigilant performance monitoring will ensure that your enterprise application continues to provide its intended service.

The following sections will acquaint you with how to implement high-performance data access in your enterprise application.

Section	Description
What Is Application Performance?	Defines the different types of application performance.
Application Performance Factors	Explains how workload growth, hardware resource consumption, design options, and database optimizing strategies influence application performance.
Designing High-Performance Applications	Recommends some application design ideas for creating a high-performance application.
Optimizing Database Retrieval	Suggests design and programming practices to optimize data access.
Balancing Hardware Resources	Explains the hardware factors affecting performance and suggests some possible solutions.
Using Performance Monitor	Introduces Performance Monitor, the analysis tool provided with Microsoft® Windows NT®.

For More Information   There are literally hundreds of topics in the online documentation that discuss techniques to make your application run faster. To find these topics, search online for words such as "optimize," "tuning," and "performance" in MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0.