Some of the most joyful technical challenges I experienced as a developer were solving application performance problems. Isn't it fun. You are Sherlock Holmes – examining the architecture, diving into the code for clues, and scouring through logs files to find the bottlenecks that are responsible for snail's pace. However, this job is a lot harder than Sherlock Holmes or CSI. It is more like Dr. Gregory House, because you are racing against the clock. For every minute of sluggish performance, you could be losing eyeballs and therefore revenue. Worst case: the patient, i.e., your website, dies.

Performance Problems Are Usually Elevated Because Of A Crisis

Your business just launched a Super Bowl commercial that confidently directed people to your website – #fail. More likely, a new release of software performs like a dog (with apologies to Greyhounds) because of lame coding and nonexistent performance testing.

 You Need A Clever Solution, Fast

Since crisis performance problems are often caused by an unexpected influx of users or transactions from another application, you need to find a solution fast. If you are lucky, the solution to the bottle will be something easy like ordering more bandwidth or adding more web/application servers. Maybe adding a content delivery network such as Akamai, EdgeCast, Cotendo, or Limelight if you don't already have one. Not too often you will find a dumb coding mistake that can easily be fixed. Many performance problems can be solved by these aforementioned methods. But, the hardest and therefore nastiest problem is when your database is the bottleneck.

You Can't Easily Horizontally Scale A Database

Many applications access a relational database such as DB2, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. More often than not, I have found that the hardest performance problem to solve is the database bottleneck. Application performance is often governed by how quickly the database can perform queries, inserts, and updates. The problem with relational database is that you can't just add another server and double your pleasure. The reason: Relational databases do not scale horizontally.

Elastic Caching Platforms Can Help

One way to boost performance of relational databases is to add an elastic caching platform (ECP) layer between your application and the database. Elastic caching platforms offer an in-memory cache that can scale horizontally. This can give you the immediate benefit of in-memory distributed caching to boost performance and eliminate the database bottleneck. Forrester evaluated seven elastic caching platforms: Alachisoft NCache, VMware GemFire, GigaSpaces XAP Elastic Application Platform, IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale, Infinispan, ScaleOut StateServer, and Terracotta. Additional elastic caching platforms not evaluated in the Forrester Wave™ include TIBCO ActiveSpaces and Microsoft Project Codename Velocity that is now part of Azure AppFabric.

Find The Most Heinous Bottleneck And Mitigate It

The database bottleneck is often the nastiest to solve. Hopefully, the cause of your performance problem is just an ignorantly formed SQL statement that is easily fixed. But, with increasing scale, the solution to bottlenecks becomes your ability to scale horizontally.