Finding the bottleneck

The aspects of the system that you are most interested in measuring are CPU usage and memory usage. It is possible that even after extensive tuning efforts the CPU is not powerful enough to handle the workload, in which case a CPU upgrade is required. Similarly, if the program is running in an environment in which it does not have enough memory after tuning, you must increase memory size.

Given that any performance problem could be caused by any one of several factors, you must look at several areas to eliminate each one. First, determine which resource is constraining the system:
  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Input/Output (I/O)