Understanding Architecture

Most important phase of performance tuning is to understand Architecture of the System under testing. Without understanding the end to end architecture, performance tuning is like “searching needle in hay”.
Few basic components and its definitions

1. Load balancer -> Technique to spread work between two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, throughput, or response time.
2. Web server -> A computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web clients, which are known as web browsers, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects such as images, css etc.,(usually static content)
3. LDAP server -> The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP. The most common example is the telephone directory, which consists of a series of names (either of persons or organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name having an address and phone number attached. Due to this basic design (among other factors) LDAP is often used by other services for authentication(SSA).
4. Application Server -> An application server is a software engine that delivers applications to client computers or devices, typically through the Internet and using the HyperText Transfer Protocol. Application servers are distinguished from web servers by the extensive use of server-side dynamic content and frequent integration with database engines. An application server handles most, if not all, of the business logic and data access of the application.
5. Database server -> complex set of software programs that controls the organization, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database.

During testing, monitoring and logging all the components + OS involved is mandatory. Without monitoring all components including network, improvement/tuning acheived is pure luck.

Next blog plan: monitoring

-Thiru