Thursday 6 February 2014

is performance important?

Over the last decade, seismic progress has been made in the realms of application performance management - development in diagnostics, predictive analytics and DevOps enable application performance to be driven harder and measured in more ways than ever before.

But is application performance important?  On surface value it seems like a rhetorical question: performance relating to the user experience is paramount, driving customer satisfaction, repeat business, competitive selection, brand reputation - yes, performance is important. However, it is more often the change in performance that more directly influences these behaviours. A response time of 2 seconds may be acceptable if it meets the user expectation - but could be awful if users were expecting a half-second latency. User experience is more than just performance, and the quality of the user experience is related to performance, availability, design, navigability, ease-of-use, accessibility and more.  Performance is important, yes - to a point.

The flip-side of performance is throughput, the rate at which business is processed.  Without contention, throughput rises directly in proportion to workload volume, without compromising performance. However, when contention starts - performance suffers and, crucially, throughput starts to drop in proportion to the arrival rate. In other words, in a contention state - the rate at which business is transacted becomes impacted.

So - is performance important?  Yes, clearly it is important, but only in the context of user-experience. However, a far more important measure of business success is throughput, as it is directly related to business velocity - how fast can a business generate revenue?

Consider the graph below, showing the relationship between performance and throughput for a business service.  The point at which throughput is compromised corresponds to a 20% drop in response time.  Yet, user-experience is largely maintained at this level of performance, customers are not complaining en masse until performance is degraded by double that amount.  At this point, the damage is already done.


SUMMARY
When seeking to understand the risk-margin in service delivery, the more pertinent metric for business performance is to focus on throughput.  By building out a scalability assessment of your business services, the relationship between performance and throughput can be derived - and the right amount of capacity allocated in order to avoid the potential throughput issue.  Such an assessment can be empirical, but for highest fidelity - a simulation approach should be adopted.

The chart above was created using CA Performance Optimizer - a simulation technology that predicts application scalability under a range of different scenarios.

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