Application Performance

Software Application Speed and ADD Users

ADD — aka Attention Deficit Disorder — is, some say, an altogether too common ailment in today’s society, at least in the U.S. While I certainly don’t intend to debate that issue, a recent experience got me to thinking about how children with ADD do and will grow up to be computer application users. These thoughts in turn had me thinking once again about application interface design and user needs.

Much is written about interface design. For years we’ve worked hard to provide intuitive “user-friendly” interfaces for our applications. Much has been written about visual presentation, and many options for changes to the visual presentation such as “skinning” have been introduced.

Perhaps, however, the most important of all the considerations for an application should be the application response time. I’m not aware of any user who doesn’t get impatient with poor response - defined here as a response time meeting their personal expectation! As more and more users (ADD or otherwise) become frustrated with either speed issues OR for some, the cluttered screen, it seems imperative that we as developers be constantly on the alert for signs of this frustration brewing. My experience would indicate that most computer applications used in a business environment are not being used by “computer” users, but rather by users who understand the task or job they are required to do, and (in some case, regrettably) must use the “computer” to accomplish the task.

Application design is no trivial task!

Useful Tools of the Trade

A few days ago I blogged about how I was playing detective with a clients computer system, struggling with performance issues.  It has been an interesting few days since that blog, and I have discovered much, and learned along the way.

One thing that I learned about is a nifty utility offered by Microsoft which can aid in the analysis of exactly what’s going on with your Windows 2003 Server.  The utility is called Server Performance Advisor.  The utility is particularly helpful for presentation of data which is collected by the multitude of logs kept as part of normal server operations.  It also provides additional information and combines it in a much more understandable manner than just reviewing raw log data.

Starting with a system overview, it can also provide information about other common services provided by the server, like IIS, DNS, Active Directory and others.  It includes useful help!  Depending upon the selection of services the utlility collects data for either 100 or 300 seconds, and then creates analysis of the data. 

If you have a Windows Server 2003 and are not familiar with this tool I’d recommend it highly.  Follow the link to Server Performance Advisor for more information.

My search for answers this week also took me to an article on Computerworld outlining 10 Great Free Network Tools.  Since the analysis of my performance issue indicated that the issue was not network related I did not follow-up with any of these network tools, but I pass the link on for what its worth.  Hopefully it can help someone out.