Hi All,

On February 8, 2024, we asked for input from the IRIS community regarding exam topics for our InterSystems IRIS Developer Specialist exam. We will close the window for providing feedback on the exam topics on Friday, March 8, 2024. If you would like to have your say in what topics are covered on the exam, this is your last chance!

How can I access the survey? You can access it here

0 0
0 44

A customer recently asked if IRIS supported OpenTelemetry as they where seeking to measure the time that IRIS implemented SOAP Services take to complete. The customer already has several other technologies that support OpenTelemetry for process tracing. At this time, InterSystems IRIS (IRIS) do not natively support OpenTelemetry.

10 3
1 132

Hello Everyone,

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is developing an InterSystems IRIS Developer Specialist certification exam, and we are reaching out to our community for feedback that will help us evaluate and establish the contents of this exam.

3 0
1 157

[Background]

InterSystems IRIS family has a nice utility ^SystemPerformance (as known as ^pButtons in Caché and Ensemble) which outputs the database performance information into a readable HTML file. When you run ^SystemPerformance on IRIS for Windows, a HTML file is created where both our own performance log mgstat and Windows performance log are included.

11 1
2 379

It seems like yesterday when we did a small project in Java to test the performance of IRIS, PostgreSQL and MySQL (you can review the article we wrote back in June at the end of this article). If you remember, IRIS was superior to PostgreSQL and clearly superior to MySQL in insertions, with no big difference in queries.

7 6
3 416

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows you to run a Linux environment on your Windows machine, without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting.

WSL is designed to provide a seamless and productive experience for developers who want to use both Windows and Linux at the same time**.

2 0
1 170

When there's a performance issue, whether for all users on the system or a single process, the shortest path to understanding the root cause is usually to understand what the processes in question are spending their time doing. Are they mostly using CPU to dutifully march through their algorithm (for better or worse); or are they mostly reading database blocks from disk; or mostly waiting for something else, like LOCKs, ECP or database block collisions?

13 0
2 221

Is there a difference in outcome between the two screengrabs below?

In both cases, when certain conditions are met, a transformation is called and the output sent on to two targets. In the first case we surmise the transformation is called twice, and the output of the first run sent to the first target, the output of the second run to the second target. In the second case we surmise the transformation is called once, and the output duplicated and sent to the two targets.

0 1
0 122

Most transactional applications have a 70:30 RW profile. However, some special cases have extremely high write IO profiles.

I ran storage IO tests in the ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) AWS region to simulate IRIS database IO patterns and throughput similar to a very high write rate application.

The test aimed to determine whether the EC2 instance types and EBS volume types available in the AWS Australian regions will support the high IO rates and throughput required.

5 0
0 549

There is several classes that allow to create TCP/IP connections (eg: to connect to a service).

Example : %Net.FtpSession (port 21), %Net.HttpRequest (usually port 80 or 443)

AFAIK connection will stay open unless closed explicitly or if variable that hold the instance is garbage collected.

Is there a way to get a list of all active (open) TCP/IP connections IRIS is maintaining so far ?

0 6
0 239

Hi Community,

Watch this video to learn how InterSystems software enables both horizontal and vertical scaling:

Scaling for User and Data Volume in InterSystems IRIS

https://www.youtube.com/embed/A477wcJL2LA
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

1 0
0 151

InterSystems IRIS offers various ways how to profile your code, in most cases it produces enough information to find the places where the most time is spent or where the most global sets. But sometimes it's difficult to understand the execution flow and how it ended at that point.

To solve this, I've decided to implement a way to build a report in a way, so, it's possible to dive by stack down

3 4
1 256

Hello,

I would like to get a list of all globals that have been read or written during a given context. In Portal, there are counters in dashboard that give the number of read/write to globals in general.

What I am looking for :

- some handler (eg: like $ZTRAP) that will be called everytime something is read/written to a global.

- to activate a "global log mode" in Portal that will dump some information to a file (like ^ISCSOAP for SOAP requests).

1 2
0 176
Article
· May 25, 2023 12m read
AWS Capacity planning review example

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;
- Compute requirements.
- Storage requirements.

9 1
3 557

Hey Developers,

Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

System Performance Review for InterSystems IRIS Applications @ Global Summit 2022

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lGnJS3VMFUA
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

0 0
0 361

Hi,

If I test the Native api for Node.js from the documentation, I noticed (if I'm correct) all methods and calls are synchronous. By default due to the nature of Node.js, there is only one thread of execution and normally all JavaScript methods and all calls should be asynchronous and use either a callback function (the "old way") or promises or the async/await contruct to return their result, e.g.:

0 13
0 452

The following steps show you how to display a sample list of metrics available from the /api/monitor service.

In the last post, I gave an overview of the service that exposes IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. The post shows how to set up and run IRIS preview release 2019.4 in a container and then list the metrics.


This post assumes you have Docker installed. If not, go and do that now for your platform :)

17 10
5 1.2K

YASPE is the successor to YAPE (Yet Another pButtons Extractor). YASPE has been written from the ground up with many internal changes to allow easier maintenance and enhancements.

YASPE functions:

  • Parse and chart InterSystems Caché pButtons and InterSystems IRIS SystemPerformance files for quick performance analysis of Operating System and IRIS metrics.
  • Allow a deeper dive by creating ad-hoc charts and by creating charts combining the Operating System and IRIS metrics with the "Pretty Performance" option.
  • The "System Overview" option saves you from searching your SystemPerformance files for system details or common configuration options.

YASPE is written in Python and is available on GitHub as source code or for Docker containers at:


12 1
4 421

Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

23 13
5 4.3K

While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

6 15
4 1K

Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

9 7
2 2.7K