RL043 Brett Swaim on Application Performance Management

Radio Liferay

I'm talking with Brett Swaim, Principal Consultant at Liferay US, on application performance monitoring, horror stories and things to avoid. Brett is dealing with a lot of customers. He's one of Liferay's go-to resources for performance tuning and monitoring. Brett had a presentation on >DevOps Best Practices with Liferay, Logstash, Kibana, Elasticsearch, and New Relic at Devcon (among other symposiums and events). If you missed it or just want the audio summary (both were my motivations to talk to him), we're talking about his experience, using one of the projects (an unnamed one) as an example.

This is a short conversation as we didn't have a lot of time in between different appointments, but we've committed to making this a series of episodes on similar topics - and more in depth.

We talked about

• Application Lifecycle and Performance monitoring, New Relic (used as a sample here), Compuware , AppDynamics. Or check the Gartner Quadrant
• If you can't host in the cloud, you can use the same strategies that Brett is talking about with on-premise solutions
• How do you know your application is slow?
• ELK-Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana)
• adding page load times to Apache Logs
• It matters where you measure from: Internal network, external network.
• Default configuration of Liferay - memory, garbage collection and other JVM settings
• You can have too much memory in your JVM
• Liferay's Whitepapers have starting points, you shouldn't use them as your final settings.
• ...and you'll actually need to measure for yourself in order to find your number...
• CDN setup and its results on high volume site
• Be proactive. You'll find bottlenecks before your users do.