HomePerformance goes Global at STA Travel
STA TRAVEL shows how DBTuna and dynaTrace have helped improve Oracle and Java performance during testing – which was critical to ensuring that the vital Globe Project could go live prior to Christmas 2008.
“The introduction of our new Globe internet booking engine has been the number one project for us during 2008” said Simon Blyth, Project Manager at STA Travel. “Globe’s success will underpin our future business growth, particularly in the US market, where providing our customers with a fast and easy to use web experience is paramount. The last thing we can risk happening is for our potential customers to suffer from slow response times as this will only cause frustration and increase the likelihood that they may purchase flights or book hotels from our competitors.”
“It was for this reason that we have been working with Application Performance Ltd (AP) in order to improve the performance of our JBoss and Tomcat application servers as well as our backend Oracle database. AP recommended that we use dynaTrace in order to monitor and optimise the performance of our multiple Java application servers and DBTuna for Oracle. Using these tools has meant that we have been able to isolate performance bottlenecks within our Globe application during testing, significantly reducing the time taken to reach the level of performance required to go live. In short these products have helped ensure that we have been able to go live before the all important Christmas and Thanksgiving holiday season.
Performance tuning JBoss and Tomcat
“Prior to using dynaTrace although we could see which transactions ran slowly during a performance test, we had no idea why they ran slowly. To be honest we were pretty blind when it came to understanding the internals of our new Globe application and badly needed a tool that could help give us some visibility.”
“dynaTrace was able to show us in just a couple of days exactly how the different application modules , JBoss and Tomcat application tiers, plus interactions with external data providers and our backend Oracle database all hung together. It is this unique ability to track transactions across logical and physical application boundaries combined with being able to compare component and transaction performance side-by-side for each load test that makes dynaTrace so unique.”
Performance tuning Oracle
“We showed during performance testing that there was a direct correlation between database performance and end user performance, so we decided to invest in a database monitoring tool that could help us understand in detail how our Oracle database resources were being used in order to pinpoint opportunities to remove performance bottlenecks. DBTuna was already being used successfully by our infrastructure team across multiple production SQL Server and Oracle databases, so it made perfect sense for us to extend its use to our performance test environment.”
“Installation of DBTuna took only a few minutes and from our very first load test we were able to spot really significant bottlenecks. Being able to run a test, tune Oracle based on the results and re-run the test to compare the results was a revolution for us and our third party application developer. Within a few days we were able to isolate and resolve multiple performance problems that together have given us a performance boost of 40% with resulting improved end-user response times meaning that we were able to go live before Christmas. In terms of Return-On-Investment, DBTuna has already paid for itself multiple times over and I have no reservations in recommending it to anyone wishing to run a performance load test. Going forward we intend to use DBTuna data from our production Globe environment in order to continually look for additional performance tuning opportunities.
We really value keeping a complete history of Oracle performance in order to proactively spot problems and track the impact of any changes made.
The bottom line...
“Using DBTuna during performance testing has given us tremendous benefits and we intend to ensure that all future versions of our Globe application are similarly optimised before release. dynaTrace has also proved itself as a great way to improve visibility of our application in all it’s complexity. I have no reservations in recommending these tools to other organisations; using them is like turning on a spotlight!”
“We also really appreciate the fact that Application Performance, having first taken the time to understand our business and challenges, were able to recommend these great tools and support us at a critical time. They really have become part of the team and we look forward to working with them over the long term. Having completed the implementation of dynaTrace and DBTuna we plan to work with them to investigate the benefits of Borland’s SilkTest® and SilkCentral® Test Manager™ products to improve how we approach Functional Testing.”
Our environment
- JBoss (4.2.0.GA)
- Tomcat (6.0.14)
- Oracle (10g R2)
- Redhat Linux (ES4 64-bit)
dynaTrace – summary of benefits
- Shows resource usage and performance for each component of your application
- Uniquely tracks transactions across multiple application modules, Java tiers and data sources
- Allows you to benchmark the performance of each component, transaction and SQL statement, enabling you to quickly isolate changes across different load tests
- Traps exceptions caused by poor application code that otherwise would be missed
- Makes it easy to share Java application performance data with developers
DBTuna – summary of benefits
- Quick to install: “we were up and running in minutes”
- Easy to use “even as non-DBAs, we were able to clearly see where the performance bottlenecks were”
- Highlighted inefficient Oracle indexes
- Highlighted excessive Row Locks caused by the application trying to write duplicate data into the database “having isolated the problem our third party application provider was able to fix it in a few hours”
- Provided a 40% performance boost for Oracle and correspondingly to the response time experienced by end users.
- Return-On-Investment “DBTuna has paid for itself many times over in just a few weeks”
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