Performance Engineering

How does one engineer "PERFORMANCE" ?

Performance Engineering is one of the niche areas today...with most corporates spending large amounts of money to achieve the required performance. So whats Performance Engineering?

Its the science related to performance in terms of both Software and Hardware.

So both Hardware and Software have performance requirements. In order to meet the performance requirements in a systematic ,quantitative approach which can also be cost effective. What constitutes a Hardware --The machine,Storage,Terminals. Software consists of Operating System,Database,Middle ware, Web/App servers ,S/W Applications etc.

Food for thought there are councils i.e determine the performance benchmarks (a point of reference)of Database,Web/App servers, Also it provides OS performance(provided by the OS vendor generally) with regard to hardware . In terms of Database benchmarks a site good to visit http://www.tpc.org/ ... for OS like Solaris http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/software/solaris.xml

What about custom developed applications??? For this need to first define the Non functional requirements of the application . We also need to have a performance objective. Now a days with use of profiler's ,simulators during construction of the application , we can try to ensure that application being constructed meets the performance objectives that is defined.

Other Links of interests related to performance

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998537.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_law -- N=λT

N is the number users

λ (Think Time +Response Time)

T-Throughput

http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/performance.jsp -Java SE performance

http://www.perfeng.com/ - Software Performance !!