What is a performance problem

Support personnel need to determine when a reported problem is a functional problem or a performance problem.

When an application, a hardware system, or a network is not behaving correctly, this is referred to as a functional problem. For example, an application or a system with a memory leak has a functional problem.

Sometimes functional problems lead to performance problems; for example, when the functions are being achieved, but the speed of the functions are slow. In these cases, rather than tune the system, it is more important to determine the root cause of the problem and fix it. Another example would be when communication is slowed because of networks or name servers that are down.