This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

Performance Consulting If organizations are to be successful they must improve individual and organizational performance in order to establish and maintain a high-performance workplace, develop intellectual capital, promote productivity, and ultimately enhance profitability. Performance Consulting reveals how to distinguish between the signs and symptoms of productivity problems from the underlying root causes and find the most ethical and cost-effective solutions to solve those problems. The book is written for performance consultants, HR professionals, and any leader who want to fulfill the role of a performance consultant in order to develop more productive workers and create a globally-competitive organization. Filled with illustrative examples from giants in the field of human performance technology, the book describes the skills needed in order to become an effective performance consultant. Step by step the author clearly shows how to uncover and deal with challenges and opportunities to improve human performance of organizations by analyzing their present and envisioning their future. The book offers vital information for examining an organization's present conditions that are associated with data collection and analysis methods. It also describes how to foresee future conditions of an organization associated with relevant sources in order to determine their future course. Performance Consulting includes guidelines for implementing performance improvement solutions, which are often identified as performance improvement interventions. The book explains which approaches can offer the solutions that are likely to be most cost-effective, timely, ethical, and socially-responsible. No matter what size your organization or your current job responsibilities, Performance Consulting offers the strategies and information needed to become a dynamic performance consultant.

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that. Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to: Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs) Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises. "Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience."-- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne

Pro PHP Application Performance will help you understand all the technologies and components which play a role in how well your applications run. When seconds can mean the difference between retaining a user and losing a user, it's important for all of us to have optimization as part of our project roadmap. But what components within your application should you analyze? How should you optimize? And how can you measure how well your application is performing? These are some of the questions that are answered in this book. Along the way you will also learn the "why" of optimizing. You’ll discover why you should optimize a specific component, why selecting one function over another is beneficial, and how to find and use the optimization tools available to the open source community. You’ll also learn how to deploy caching software as well as web server software. Pro PHP Application Performance will also teach you more advanced techniques, such as: • Using Xdebug to profile functions that are not running as efficiently as possible. • Comparing opcode executed by different PHP functions to narrow the search for functions that run efficiently. • Using strace to analyze Apache while your application is served to the user. Once you complete this book you will have a complete sense of where to start optimizing and, most importantly, have the tools which allow you to continue optimizing in other PHP applications going forward.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Despite the widespread recognition that performance is important to the success of a project, many software products fail to respond fast enough to user requests or to handle a certain amount of parallel business transactions. This is because nowadays projects are result-oriented where the focus is on functionality to be implemented. Such projects do not pay high attention to application performance because it still does not have the particular importance that unit testing for example has. Moreover today s development models usually consider performance management only in a limited way within their lifecycle and often follow what is known as the fix it later approach. The fix it later approach concentrates on software correctness and defers performance considerations to the integration testing phase where additional hardware is added or a system is tuned when performance issues are detected. The problem of neglecting performance management is that performance issues often do not emerge until an application is put into production, where it is likely to suffer the consequences of a performance failure. The consequences of performance failures can be increased operational costs, increased development and hardware costs, and damaged customer relations. If severe performance issues are discovered during production, it may be too expensive to re-design a system or even impossible to add additional hardware in order to meet performance objectives. Such projects are likely to be canceled and their costs will be unrecoverable. To avoid such situations, performance management should be integrated into an application s lifecycle from the beginning. This means that performance objectives have to be defined early within a project and continually verified as an application evolves. Having performance management integrated from the beginning allows to reduce overall project risk and costs because performance issues can be spotted and corrected early in the lifecycle and even before end users are affected. Furthermore an application is extensively tested for its ability of reaching performance objectives before it is deployed to a production environment and exposed to real users. NovaTec GmbH is a company providing IT-services in the area of consulting, project management, software engineering, application architectures, provisioning, performance management, and process engineering. The competences of NovaTec are logically grouped in [...]

Maximizing the performance of your algorithms and applications is extremely important and can give you a competitive advantage, a lower cost of ownership, and happier users. Pro .NET Performance explains the internals of Windows, the CLR, and the physical hardware that affect the performance of your applications, and gives you the knowledge and tools to measure how your code performs in isolation from external factors. The book is full of C# code samples and tips to help you squeeze every bit of juice from your application—lower memory utilization, consistent CPU usage, and fewer I/O operations across the network and disk. Pro .NET Performance will change the way you think about .NET application development. Guides you through performance measurement with a variety of profilers and other tools Explains how OS and CLR internals affect your application’s performance in unexpected ways Provides you with tips and real-life case studies for improving application performance