reesesWeb

So, last week, performance was _godawful_. Everything took about three years longer than it should. Viewing a single page took anywhere from a minute to twenty minutes, when of course, all should take less than n seconds, where n is your human factors interval of choice. PM throws a hissy fit, gets worked up, demands another senior architect on the project to help with the performance problems. All without discussing it with me. When she finally does, my lack of concern apparently proves to her that I'm an idiot. We had over two weeks to launch, and I could make steamed duck farts scale in that amount of time.

Since we're working on a weird environment (MSSQL and NT), I availed myself of the glorious NT performance counters, and noticed that our tps rate was exactly the same as our logins-per-second rate. Suspicious, if you're using JDBC connection pooling, yes?

So, in talking to the company rep, it turns out that we're the only people using the real XA data source. That is, the provider bundles a fake transactional jdbc driver that sits on top of a vendor-specific database driver and makes it appear to do rollbacks, commits, etc. The documentation and configuration all say,"Use the fake one only if your vendor does not provide a true XA data source."

OK, our vendor provides a true XA data source, so we'll use that.

It looks as if the steaming heap of poop (did I mention you can't do "where foo is not null" in a query without it throwing a SQLException?) logs in to use session-based transactions. For every interaction with the server!

Anyway, I had our environments guy fix it, and performance improved rather dramatically. However, with two to ten simultaneous users on staging (roughly 1/4 the size of production) pageviews still take just over a second. Now, the PM is relaxed and happy, and I have to explain that it's actually the point at which we should start paying attention to performance. She likes thrashing people around on different tasks, which drives me mad. I have no idea what's going on because she can't let things sit for a day.

PMs should be kicked off projects as soon as they enter QA. They should be chained to their desks, and only allowed to talk to one or two other people. Especially non-technical ones that argue technical strategy.

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