Chapter 9. Essential Tools for Performance Tuning

To be able to improve the performance of your system you need a prior understanding of what can be improved, how it can be improved, how much it can be improved, and, most importantly, what impact the improvement will have on the overall performance of your system. You need to be able to identify those things that, after you have done your best to improve them, will yield substantial benefits for the overall system performance. Concentrate your efforts on them, and avoid wasting time on improvements that give little overall gain.

If you have a small application it may be possible to detect places that could be improved simply by inspecting the code. On the other hand, if you have a large application, or many applications, it's usually impossible to do the detective work with the naked eye. You need observation instruments and measurement tools. These belong to the benchmarking and code-profiling categories.

It's important to understand that in the majority of the benchmarking tests that we will execute, we will not be looking at absolute results. Few machines will have exactly the same hardware and software setup, so this kind of comparison would usually be misleading, and in most cases we will be trying to show which coding approach is preferable, so the hardware is almost irrelevant.

Rather than looking at absolute results, we will be looking at the differences between two or more result sets run on the same machine. This is what you should do; you shouldn't try to compare the absolute results collected here with the results of those same benchmarks on your own machines.

In this chapter we will present a few existing tools that are widely used; we will apply them to example code snippets to show you how performance can be measured, monitored, and improved; and we will give you an idea of how you can develop your own tools.