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InfoQ Homepage News Article: The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks

Article: The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks

Quite often performance problems will be reported with some very antidotal comments that do nothing to help you understand where to start looking. Faced with this dilemma, it is not uncommon for teams to start guessing at the root cause.

Performance tuning specialist Kirk Pepperdine has shared one of his own approaches for starting to find the true cause of performance problems: "the box" - a little diagram that is an abstraction of a complete system. The box is a reminder of the true causes of performance bottlenecks.

Read  The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks.

The has 4 layers: People, Application, Java Virtual Machine, and Hardware. Each of these layers has a role in systems performance, and Kirk talks about when   The purpose of the box is to eliminate guessing by showing us how to sequence an investigation.

Kirk advocates a bottom to top investigative process, the goal of which is to eliminate as many potential sources for the bottlenecks as can possibly eliminated before we start looking at the code.

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