ATG performance tuning is not a Black Art. I have over 10 years of experience with ATG, and hopefully I can provide a guide to performance tuning your ATG application.
Improving web application performance is an often overlooked way to cut costs and increase sales. Complex ATG E-Commerce applications in particular are often left untuned due to the scope of the application and typical tight timelines of project cycles. It’s not mysterious voodoo, and it WILL be worth the time you put into it.
Web application performance can be split into two sections:
- The End User’s perception of the site performance
- The Server’s perception of the site performance
The first section relates to how quickly pages render for the user and how responsive the site feels. The less time the user spends waiting for the page to load and render, the more likely they are to make a purchase/sign-up/or whatever your conversion goal is. Relevant metrics would be page load time, page asset load time, and page render time.
The second section relates to how many users or transactions an application server can support with acceptable response times. Relevant metrics would include requests per second within the context of reasonable CPU load, I/O wait, etc…
Luckily many of the change we end up making to improve the end user’s experience will also reduce the processing and request load on the servers, so there are some inter-dependancies.
I’m going to tackle the two sections of web application performance in two separate blog posts here, and hopefully will show you how to diagnose the poorly performing aspects of your site, figure out the biggest improvements you can make, and implement the changes. While these posts will focus on ATG based applications, much of what I’m going to cover is true for any web site or web application.
—————Posts in this series so far————–
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