NetworkWorld's Senior Editor Denise Dubie provides her views on What is considered good application performance?

The article essentially concludes that whatever the end user can tolerate is probably adequate performance. I was hoping for more technical content and details of studies or something like that.

Don't Get Caught With Your Britches Down (hat tip to Capt Kirk in Wrath of Khan)

The best point made in the article is that the web developers, network managers, and/or performance engineers can get surprised when performance problems start to become noticeable by the end users. It sneaks up on us!

"Usage of the portal could slowly increase -- not registering a spike in activity across the monitoring systems network managers use to track performance issues. Time outs and unavailability of functions could occur when all the health indicators seem normal and operating at the expected levels, because something in the application or the infrastructure might not have changed, it would take some time for network managers to figure out why out of seemingly nowhere performance degraded."

My advice is simple:

Set up your load testing plans to cover the primary user types and scenarios for your application. Then run those tests against production weekly or monthly at off-times like Sunday morning at 3:00 a.m.

The tests don't need to be overly complex. They don't need to run for several hours - you aren't looking for memory leaks. You need to know if the application's performance is where you expect it. Compare the results to last week's test results.

The whole regression load testing process should take about 2 hours of your actual time. I am convinced that 2 hours is well invested time for you if you care about performance. Are you the Product Manager? Are you the Marketing Manager? Do you have responsibility in IT for this app? There could be several people in your organization that really do care about the performance - even if they don't think about it.

Not Even the CTO is Consulted for Every Little Change

There are more reasons to worry about web application performance degradation than just gradually having increasing concurrent users. How often do you release bug fixes in your web app? Do your network guys ever make configuration changes in the infrastructure without telling you? Has some Apache guru ever tweaked some settings without consulting you? Is it possible that the DBA could adjust a few parameters that impact your app's ability to get connections? ABSOLUTELY!!

Protect your web application! Protect yourself! Don't let "seemingly out of nowhere" your app's performance degrade. Don't let it sneak up on you.

I hate those meetings where the senior execs get involved and call you in after it is too late (performance failure). You want to be a hero, a winner, a respected web developer.

So be proactive - start regression load testing now. It won't take that long. Just do it.