Preventing dynaSight Performance Problems

If your applications start to deal with millions of records in your database, performance, sooner or later, definitely becomes an issue. We will be presenting a series of tips on the topic of performance tuning with dynaSight and here we wish to present some general guidelines and a few pieces of advice to get started on this topic.

- Start your performance tuning work at the very beginning of your projects by applying preventive techniques such as effective database design, proper indexing, effective use of primary keys, and plenty of other approaches that make sure that your screen response time is generally under 10 seconds.

- Do not wait until screens become slow in production due to cumulative data, as that may be too late and a very substantial effort may be required to correct the problem.

- Proceed by isolating the bottleneck. Sometimes it may be in several places. Should this be the case, deal with each individually.

- Once you have eliminated the database as your source of performance problems, turn your attention to the application. Look for unnecessary updating of objects in complex screens. Many, if not most, objects are updated when the document is opened therefore an additional update of such objects is redundant and time consuming.

- Check for the use of objects that are not required for your data. This can happen if you use OnOpen triggers or the update function to manually update an object.

- Periodically examine your dynaSight trace file (both database and application) during development even if no performance problems are arising. This will help you develop a familiarity with the internals of your applications and will help you recognize even small problems when they arise.

- In looking at the trace file do not hesitate to ask others to look through with you. The trace files do not make easy reading for complex documents. Two pairs of eyes are better than one!

As mentioned above, we will be going into more detail in future tips on individual performance improving techniques but the above guidelines should be helpful in putting the right foot forward.

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