Performance techniques

Techniques we are using to improve performance:

1) Do more at once in a transaction.

With coarser grained transactions, we spend less time looking up stuff in caches and merging changes and more time actually doing the important work.

For example: Our importer was importing 1 measurement at a time. By grouping the measurements together on a per facility basis and updating them in a single transaction we reduced the time by 50%. DEspite caching

2) Cache.

Yep. It works. In our case we cache our snapshots (www.martinfowler.com/ap2/snapshot.html) which are constructed frequently in our networks of facilities.

For Example: Had one process come down from an hour to process to mere minutes.

3) Convert dynamically calculated results to stored results.

For example: Our statuses were being calculated all the time for complex large networks. Made the GUI slow. Store the results and poof things sped up by a factor of 5.

4) Convert stored information to dynamically calculated.

For example: We currently store some summary numbers for one of our facilities. Everytime something changes we redo our calculations. They end up being done over and over.

Instead, we make it an on demand calculation and our performance goes way up.

Many times we are pushing the time around, from a place where it hurts to one where it is OK.