Validating your performance objectives

After beginning to review and monitor performance, you need to find out if your objectives are reasonable.

About this task

You should consider questions about the objectives, such as:
  • Are they achievable, given the available hardware?
  • Are they based upon actual measurements of the workload?

Procedure

To measure performance against initial objectives and report the results to users:

  1. Identify any systematic differences between the internal response time, the measured performance data, and the external response time, what the user sees.
  2. If the measurements differ greatly from the estimates:
    • Revise response-time objectives for the application
    • Upgrade your system
    • Plan a reduced application workload.
    If, however, the differences between internal and external response times are not too large, you can begin monitoring and tuning the entire system.