ATG Performance Tuning

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:

  1. The End User’s perception of the site performance
  2. 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————–

  1. ATG User Experience Performance Tuning
  2. Why Is User Experience Performance So Important?
  3. Improving JSP Serving Time for an ATG Application
  4. Improving Secondary Asset Load Time for an ATG Application
  5. Improving ATG Performance With a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

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3 responses to “ATG Performance Tuning”

  1. […] my ATG Performance Tuning post I mentioned that how a user perceives the site performance impacts their behavior on the site, […]

  2. justin myatt Avatar

    Devon (nice name by the way, my number 2 daughter is called the same),

    Some pointers on profiling your code, such as jprofile, use of nmon to help check OS server issues would be nice.

    Many thanks for your hard work!

    cheers

    _Justin

    1. Devon Avatar

      Justin,

      thanks! I haven’t gotten around to the more server-side tuning aspects. I like your suggestion but I’ll admit my experience with jprofile and nmon are limited. Would you be able to provide some tips or a small write up or guest blog post or something?

      Thanks!

      Devon

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