In the last quarter, we have executed a variety of performance testing and tuning projects, across various business verticals. Most of the clients are doing this exercise, for the very first time. The initial feel of the CIO and the IT Head was that the vendors have given a fatty proposal with a lot of gas. So they did not start and waited for a month and started picking the brains of people in performance world.

When we talked to such CIOs, the first thing we did was that to spend an hour with them to help them size it properly. Two principles we suggested and it worked 10 out of 10 times.

Start with top 3 most frequently used scenarios; hit those again and again, tune those.

Do not try to boil the ocean. There may be 20-30 scenarios that can give load to your app. But nail those top 3 first; then attack the rest. At least you will make a start, rather than getting stalled. This also helped the CIOs to allocate a smaller budget to quickly move and have some concrete performance data in their hands.

Monitor every thing along the application chain.

Hitting with 1000s of users and just seeing the response time is not enough. Monitor the performance metrics of web server, app server and database server. Have a profiler to check the slow methods and slow queries. This will take you directly to the bottleneck, rather than shooting in the dark.

Just with these 2 principles, we are able to move at jet speed and the CIOs started seeing performance details within a few days.

When project goes in agile mode, performance testing must also go in agile mode. Show the results quickly and make customers happy.

Perform Faster.