Posts Tagged ‘performance issue’

Building a high-performance platform – Key points

Posted: June 28, 2023 by Virendra Yaduvanshi in Database Administrator
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Building a high-performance platform requires careful planning, efficient architecture, and optimization techniques. Below are some key considerations and best practices to keep in mind during building a high-performance platform,

Define Performance Goals: Need to clearly define expected performance goals and metrics early on. Need to work hard on to understand the expected load, response times, and user expectations from platform.

Scalable Architecture: Design a scalable architecture that can handle increasing loads without compromising performance. Consider using distributed systems, load balancers, and caching mechanisms to distribute the workload efficiently.

Efficient Database Design: It’s a continuous process to Optimize your database design and queries to ensure fast and efficient data retrieval. Use indexing, query optimization techniques, and denormalization when appropriate.

Caching: Implement caching mechanisms to reduce the load on backend systems. Utilize in-memory caches, content delivery networks (CDNs), and caching proxies to serve frequently accessed data quickly.

Asynchronous Processing: Offload time-consuming and non-blocking tasks to asynchronous processes or background jobs. This allows the platform to handle concurrent requests efficiently and improve responsiveness.

Code Optimization: Write efficient and optimized code. Minimize resource-intensive operations, avoid unnecessary loops or recursion, and use algorithms and data structures that offer better performance.

Performance Testing: Regularly perform load testing and performance profiling to identify bottlenecks, scalability issues, and areas for improvement. Tools like JMeter or Gatling can help simulate high user loads and measure performance.

Monitoring and Logging: Implement robust monitoring and logging solutions to track the performance of your platform in real-time. Use metrics and logs to identify issues, analyze trends, and make data-driven optimizations.

Continuous Optimization: Continuously analyze performance data and user feedback to identify areas for optimization. Apply iterative improvements to enhance your platform’s performance over time.

Cloud Infrastructure: Consider leveraging cloud-based infrastructure services, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, to benefit from their scalability, reliability, and performance optimization features.

Building a high-performance platform is an ongoing process. It requires a combination of careful planning, architectural considerations, optimization techniques, and continuous monitoring and improvement.

SQL Server’s the UNSEEN bottleneck

Posted: December 18, 2013 by Virendra Yaduvanshi in Database Administrator
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Sometimes it happened with a developer or even with a DBA, a query seems to be a very perfect over time and time, having appropriate index, but taking long time to show result. As per my understanding in multiple scenario there may be various reasons. But one very common and widely happened error is data type conversion issue. As we know Data types can be converted either implicitly or explicitly. Implicit conversions are not visible to the user. SQL Server automatically converts the data from one data type to another while Explicit conversions use the CAST or CONVERT functions. The CAST and CONVERT functions convert a value (a local variable, a column, or another expression) from one data type to another.

Here, I am pointing about Implicit conversions, it’s a silent killer and it has been seen this literally bring a system to its knees by causing deadlocks during high load, CPU at maximum utilization, performance issues and people started blaming on server, but reason is something different. Let see below example,

Create Procedure usp_VirendraTest @ID VarChar(10)
As
Select ID,Name,Fname,BloodGroup,Dept,Desig From tblVirendraTest Where ID = @ID

The code looks very adequate and works good at initial stage but it starts show their own color when table’s rows count become multi millions. The reason is ID column belongs to INT data type and Developers and even DBAs get confused and write a procedure with the wrong data type in this scenario. Now problem started, every time SQL Server has to look for a ID values and it has to convert @ID from a VarChar to an Int. This is an implicit conversion of data type. Internally, SQL Server uses a convert function perform this operation. When this happens, SQL Server cannot use an index effectively. it has to convert the value for each and every row and as a resultant SQL Server scans the entire table for the value. This takes time and, under default locking modes, places a share lock on the entire table preventing other processes from updating/Inserting/Deleting records while the scan is taking place.

The solution for this type of problem is use of CAST or CONVERT.

Here is the Data type conversions chart from Microsoft


Thanks for happy reading, Please comment and suggest the better ways. JJ