Using the CSP Page Statistics

Application Performance Management

Introduction

A key part of Application Performance Management (APM) is recording the activity and performance of user activity. For many web applications the closest you can get to this is to record the CSP pages or CSP based services being dispatched.

I am designing the software architecture for an Ensemble/Healthshare production to be deployed on Amazon AWS EC2 servers (2 mirrored m4.large - 4 vCPUs / 16 GiB RAM running RedHat Linux 3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64 and Healthshare for RHEL 64-bit 2016.2.1). It's a rather CPU-intensive production involving massive XSLT 2.0 transformations (massive both in terms of size and volume). I was wondering if anyone has experience configuring Ensemble productions on EC2 servers. My question or concern has to do with the following statement in the Ensemble documentation:

Please excuse my ignorance. I am trying to identify what areas would be best to review in the System Dashboard (for Cache 2010.2) for performance issues with the database. It seems to be running slower than usual, but I am trying to find out the best way to go about identifying what the issue is.

The following are captures from the System Dashboard.

As always, thanks a lot for your help.

What is APM?

I am talking about Application Performance Management at global summit, and several people have asked what that means so it is time for a bit of an explanation.

APM or Application Performance Management (sometimes referred to as Application Performance Monitoring) has a very good (if complicated) explanation on Wikipedia but to me it just means looking at performance from the users’ point of view and the level of service provided to them.

In the previous parts (1, 2) we talked about globals as trees. In this article, we will look at them as sparse arrays.

A sparse array - is a type of array where most values assume an identical value.

In practice, you will often see sparse arrays so huge that there is no point in occupying memory with identical elements. Therefore, it makes sense to organize sparse arrays in such a way that memory is not wasted on storing duplicate values.

In some programming languages, sparse arrays are part of the language - for example, in J, MATLAB. In other languages, there are special libraries that let you use them. For C++, those would be Eigen and the like.

Globals are good candidates for implementing sparse arrays for the following reasons:

Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

Have you ever thought about leveraging IIS (Internet Information Services for Windows) to improve performance and security for your Caché web applications?
Are you worried about the complexity of properly setting up IIS?

See the webinar Configuring a Web Server presented by @Kyle.Baxter, InterSystems Senior Support Specialist. Learn how to install IIS, set up it up to work with the CSP Gateway, and configure the CSP Gateway to talk to Caché.

It's almost time to get your customers upgraded to new versions - are you worried about showing off your SQL Performance after upgrades? If you want to upgrade without worrying, then I have just the program for you!!! Check out this video from Global Summit 2016 featuring yours truly explaining how to upgrade a system without worrying about pesky SQL queries showing on your waistline!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfFPYfIoR_g

Any recommendations, to this VMware disk type debate, with Cache installations in particular?

Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed

Thick Provision Eager Zeroed

Thin Provision

Note (October 2022): yape has been deprecated and replaced by YASPE, there is no more development on yape.

Note (June 2019): A lot has changed, for the latest details go here

I was benchmarking the populate utils when I noticed something strange. Consider this simple benchmarking method:

This post provides guidelines for configuration, system sizing and capacity planning when deploying Caché 2015 and later on a VMware ESXi 5.5 and later environment.

Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

• Part 1 - Getting started on the Journey, collecting metrics.
• Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected.
• Part 3 - Focus on CPU.
• Part 4 - Looking at memory.
• Part 5 - Monitoring with SNMP.
• Part 6 - Caché storage IO profile.
• Part 7 - ECP for performance, scalability and availability.
• Part 8 - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning
• Part 9 - Caché VMware Best Practice Guide
• Part 10 - VM Backups and IRIS freeze/thaw scripts
• Part 11 - Virtualizing large databases - VMware cpu capacity planning

It has been noticed that some customers running JAVA programs (for example, FOP) on AIX would see the server eventually running low then out of memory. Customer would notice the system pages heavily and user experience becomes bad. And the server would crash when out of memory.

When the problem happens, we can see in ipcs a lot of shared memory segment marked for deletion (Capital D at the beginning of MODE section). This means they will not disappear until the last process attached to the segment detaches it.