Managing, monitoring, and improving application responsiveness is a common need for many software professionals. Whether you develop applications or manage them, understanding application responsiveness and the major mechanisms that affect it is key to achieving successful applications and happy users. In this workshop, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) will provide a an in-depth overview of Latency and Response Time Characterization, including proven methodologies for measuring, reporting, and investigating latencies, and and overview of some common pitfalls encountered (far too often) in the field.

WHAT WILL I LEARN Our discussion will include an exploration of the common needs and motivations for understanding the behaviour of application response time and latency, and ways to successfully capture these descriptions and relate them to business needs. However, even good characterization of bad data is useless. If measurements of response time present false or misleading latency information, even the best analysis can lead to wrong operational decisions and poor application experience. We will demonstrate and discusses some common pitfalls, false assumptions and problematic measurement techniques that lead to dramatically incorrect reporting results, and will explain how these false measurements naturally occur using the most common measurement methods and tools in use today. We will discuss the coordinated data omission problem, and ways to work around it, and will introduce and demonstrate how simple and recently open sourced tools can be used to improve and gain higher confidence in both latency measurement and reporting. The workshop will include interactive walk throughs of commonly used load generation and latency measurement code to demonstrate some of specific issues discussed, and examine various ways to correct or avoid the issues in actual use. While the material generally applies to all application environments, specific considerations in garbage collected environments (such as Java) will also be covered.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND DevOps, software developers, architects, engineers and anyone with an interest understanding latency , response time, and how to both require and get better performance and behaviour from your applications