Java Enterprise Best Practices

Plan for Performance Factors

There are five performance factors that you should always plan for:

Workload

The amount of work that will be performed by the system. This is defined by the number of users, their activity levels, and types of activity, together with any non-user-initiated automatic activity such as background and batch processes. The performance plan needs to take into account how these factors will scale and change over time, and should consider average and peak workloads.

Throughput

The total amount of work the system can handle. Technically, throughput depends on a composite of I/O speed, CPU speed, and the efficiency of the operating system. Practically, throughput can be considered in terms of factors such as the number of transactions per minute that can be handled by the application, the amount of data or number of objects that can flow through the various subsystems of the application, and the number and sizes of requests that can be handled per minute. The performance plan should highlight expected transaction rates and data flow capacities as targets that need to be met.

Resources

The system’s hardware and software. Within the performance plan you need to anticipate increasing the amount or speed of hardware resources to scale the system, and ensure that the software—e.g., the operating system and middleware—is capable of handling the expected performance.

Scaling

The ability of the system to handle increasing numbers of users or objects, and increasing amounts ...