Its been over a year since, we been having fights/argument with Business regarding application performance, IT kept claiming that application performances well, but business kept saying — “I can click on a page and go for coffee and come back, go for lunch come back, go for meetings and come back and still page keeps running”. Of course I am exaggerating. Along with the database team and DBA we worked on the issue and got to the point where we felt results were good but still it was never ending battle with business.
With frustration, we started looking at the other avenues. Just to horn my webdevelopment skills, downloaded Firebug, the great Mozilla extension and found an option Net withing the utility. Net option does nothing but the “Network Monitoring “.Looking at the statistics on Net option, I was amazed that almost 20% of the time was taken by CSS and .js. Having said this, doesn’t mean that our reports were superfast, but agreement of 9sec per report was not achievable as CSS and JS were taking around 3.5 seconds. Apart from the CSS, there were few gif files were missing and http request to get those images were taking almost 1.5-2sec. All these things were adding up to the report rendering.
In the above screen shot you can see that the total time (22.08 sec) taken by the request to render on to the page. Look at the saw.dll, this is nothing but the report request to SAS server taking over 19.52 sec and rest is Java Script,CSS, images and etc.
Coming back to the main point, if you guys are profiling your application and doing the application base line, I would highly encourage using Firebug tool. Also keep in mind that its just not the query which constitutes the report performance but the CSS,JS and other things also contributes to it. Along with Firebug you can use Yahoo slow utility. It gives the nice pie view of the total time spent. see the screen shot below.
For more details on how to use Firebug in general go to http://getfirebug.com/. For yahoo slow, go to http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/.
In case of any questions, please email me at sunil_ranka@yahoo.com. If need arise I can do a conference call.
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