Analytical thinking in performance analysis

Many performance job requirements list analytical skills as one of the requirements. For people who love analysis this is a interesting job.

Lot of analysis is done using mental models or mathematical models for the scenario. Without analysis the test results are just numbers.

Major limitation of performance testing is that you cannot test all possible scenarios and use-cases. Testing and modeling complement each other. One cannot expect major re-engineering decision to be taken based on performance flaws pointed out by analytical reasoning only, they have to be backed by actual measurements.

Good modeling requires a solid understanding of how things work. When you keep looking at data from various perspectives and keep asking questions interesting insights emerge.

Below are some of the scenarios where modeling and analysis can complement testing and measurements.

Modeling and pre-analysis helps in design of right tests

For example from the understanding of architecture, when you expect synchronization issues ,you will design the test so that saturation even while CPU resource is available is clearly established

Modeling and analysis can even provide bounds on  expected results

For example, In case where all concurrent transactions serialize on a shared data structure, we know that time spent in synchronized block is serial. So if 50 microseconds are being spent inside synchronized block then there can be at most 20000 transactions per second beyond which the system will saturate.This limit is independent of number of threads executing the transactions in the server and number of available cores. If synchronization is the primary bottleneck by reducing the time spent in synchronized block to half we can double the throughput.

Modeling and analysis help in identifying the bottleneck

Simple model above has given a upper limit on throughput which can be validated by testing. if the solution saturates before that we know that primary bottleneck is somewhere else. Quite often people justify the observed results just on hunches like “Oh! solution saturated using 50% of CPU,it must be a synchronization issue” and accept the results.Without a right quantitative approach this can hide the actual bottleneck. For example in the above example if the saturation is much before 20000 transactions per seconds asking the poor developer to optimize the synchronization will not really solve the problem as the bottleneck is somewhere else

Modeling and analysis can help in answering the what if scenarios.

For example you have tested using 10 G network and someone asks what are your projections if the customer runs on a 1 G network? What are the capacity projections for the solution in this scenario?

What do you think we need higher per core capacity or larger number of cores for the deployment of the solution? if we double the available RAM what kind of improvements can we expect?
If we double the number of available cores what is the expected capacity of the system?

Modeling and analysis help in evaluation of hypothesis

For example someone thinks a particular performance problem is due to OS scheduling, this can be analytically evaluated. For example we had a scenario in which 600 threads were scheduled on 8 core server. When there were performance issues developer felt problem should be from thread contending to get scheduled. When we created the model of how CPU was being used it was very obvious the issue was not of scheduling.By accepting a false hypothesis the real cause of issues remain hidden. 

Modeling and analysis enhances our understanding of the system

When models dont match the measurements there are new learnings as we revisit our assumptions

Modeling and analysis helps in extrapolation of results

We might want to extrapolate the results due to various reasons , there can be practical limitations like you dont have enough hardware to simulate the required number of users.

We will discuss how we can model various performance scenarios in future posts.

Related Post :

Software bottlenecks:- Understanding performance of software systems with examples from road traffic

Why providing low latency is more challenging than providing scalability

Response time and capacity are the two fundamental indicators of software performance.In industry like finance low latency has a lot of value for the traders. High frequency trading which drives large percentage of trades in many markets requires very fast trading software that can react to market depth in microseconds or nanoseconds. Read about low latency challenges in finance industry here.

Performance challenges in the web technologies is more on scalability side.In trading software where we are looking at milliseconds, microseconds in the web world even 250 milliseconds is good enough as response time for end users. Even in the web world people want low service time at server side as high service time indirectly means low capacity but they wont care much if 50-100 milliseconds are added by Internet.

Why providing low latency is more challenging ?
Problem of scalability was solved with load balancing and horizontal scaling. Although there are technical challenges but a load of million of users can be distributed on thousands of serves and with proper design of software, load balancing and capacity planning.

Latency is the sum of time spent in all activities required to do some work.The time may be spent on CPU or in waits. Basic service time is the latency in which the request does not have to wait in the queue before being serviced. At very high capacity utilization the response time may be 10-100 times the basic service time if the utilization is high due to queuing. So the first important step is to have good capacity planning to manage the response time.If you get this wrong than even achieving a very low basic service time latency will be practically wasted.

Lets say you are able to achieve it and still want lower latency what do you do? Now that you know you have right load balancing and appropriate capacity utilization so that  response time is around basic service time mostly except for bursts.We now focus on reducing the basic service time.

Two basic things that can reduce the basic service time are

• Better algorithms
• Parallelism

here again not many problems have high parallelism. If you want even lower latency what do you do? To understand this we need to discuss what are the sources of latency and how industry is addressing these sources. I will discuss them in my posts in future. At a very basic level you need reduce the number of steps to complete the task or find a way to reduce the cost of steps. There are fundamental limits to reduction in number of steps or reduction of cost of a single step. Even if we look at hardware for example RAM, the increase in size and bandwidth over time has been significant but reduction in latencies is much less comparatively.

Comparing performance optimization and road travel
If you compare performance optimization to the road travel. you can achieve higher capacity by adding more lanes to the road. Here basic service time is the time to travel when road is completely empty. Your latency or time to travel increases if there is lot of traffic on the road which is like high latency due to high capacity utilization.Now if you want to reduce the time from the basic service time or time to travel on empty road, what can you do. Either you can find a shorter path or you need faster driving speed. There are limits to both of them. you cannot reduce the distance between two points beyond the shortest distance. You can not keep increasing the speed beyond a point. Similarly when reducing latency beyond a point it becomes more and more difficult. Industry is hacking into OS, libraries,network, switches hardware to reduce the sources of latencies but reducing it further is becoming more and more difficult and expensive. There are market gateways that can provide market update from wire to app memory in 1 microseconds. a single memory fetch from RAM can take 40 to 100 nano seconds so you can imagine you will exceed this latency even if you do 10 memory fetches.