Method R, LLCIdeas, explanations, and practical guidance from Method R.
Cary Millsap
Yesterday, we released Method R Workbench 9.4.1.0. This article is a tour of some of the 50 new application behavior changes. Command history scrolling In Workbench 9.3, it was a pain to try to find a given report in the output pane. For example, do this: This was a fun design problem. My initial idea was a…
Cary Millsap
This thing called “Method R” is a method for optimizing the performance of a system. The reason Method R is special is that it is itself optimized—it is designed to keep you from wasting your time. This article is about where Method R came from. In the Beginning… In the 1990s, the world was a boomtown for Oracle.…
Cary Millsap
Over the holidays, my colleague Jeff Holt and I usually use the peaceful, interruption-free time to buff up our software. One of our design journeys last week was particularly interesting. The application we were working on is an application that eats Oracle trace files for a living. You drag files into a pane in the…
Cary Millsap
If you had a chance to join my Workbench Party today, thank you for your time with us. If not, then I hope to see you next time. Here are a few links that should help fortify what we covered:
Cary Millsap
A couple of years ago (June 30, 2020), we released Method R Workbench version 9.0.0.66. It had 113 new features and bug fixes. One of those features was case 7800: “mrskew is now 10–20× faster than before.” We’re prone to sneaking in performance improvements like that. It’s because we, too, use the software we sell, and we…
Cary Millsap
Today, a reader of How to Make Things Faster asked a question about coherency delay (chapter 47): How does coherency delay manifest itself in trace files? My own awareness of the concept of coherency delay came from studying Neil Gunther’s work, where he defines it mathematically as the strength β that’s required to make your scalability curve fit…
Cary Millsap
Method R makes systems faster. And we make people who make systems faster, faster. We train people to become performance optimization heroes. Here is my story about why you should be interested in our training. Slow programs remind me of Christmas when I was a kid. In early December, my parents would put a present…
Cary Millsap
This week, my team at Method R devoted some time to an enhancement request that required an interesting design decision. This post is about the analysis behind that decision. The enhancement request was for our flagship product called Method R Workbench. It’s an application that people use to mine, manage, and manipulate Oracle trace files. One of its features,…
Michelle Skamene, Monty Latiolais, Richard Soule, and Cary Millsap
Today, Michelle Skamene, Monty Latiolais, and Richard Soule of Insum chatted with me for an hour on their live stream. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Cary Millsap
Here are some of the things we’ve been been working on. Click here to subscribe. New book: Faster Recently, I published a new book called Faster: How to Optimize a System. This one’s different from anything I’ve ever written. Faster is a book about how to make things go faster—mostly computers, but actually just about…
Cary Millsap
On Oracle-L this week is a discussion about buying Dynatrace vs. Oracle Enterprise Manager. Both tools work harmoniously together, but there’s a third choice you should consider, too: Method R Workbench. Our Workbench helps you mine unbelievable detail from Oracle trace files, even if you’re getting thousands of trace files at a time. Workbench works…
Jeff Holt
Last week, a Method R Workbench customer was having a hard time downloading Oracle trace files from Amazon RDS. The code that Amazon recommends doesn’t quite work right; it fails to copy trace file lines that are longer than 400 characters. So I wrote a replacement fetcher for him. This method should work for any Oracle implementation…
Cary Millsap
A few months ago, we received two trace files representing two executions of the same program. One execution took almost 14 times longer than the other. The cause of the difference was dominantly the number of “db file sequential read” calls made by the two executions. Why would two executions of the same program, processing…
Cary Millsap
Today, I had the honor of speaking online to the Chicago Oracle Users Group in their “20 in 2020” webinar series. In this presentation, I talk about why it’s OK to trace everything on your system and how to do it safely, and I explain why you’d want to do that in the first place.
Jeff Holt
Earlier, Mark Williams showed us how in Java to clear the session handle attributes to enable our code to be more easily traced. Because I had not seen the trace data produced when using his method, I decided to construct a test to see the trace data produced when the code does and does not…
Cary Millsap
It really is OK to trace everything—even your whole database if you want to. But you have to do it right. This session explains how to safely trace anything you want, and why you’d want to trace your programs in the first place. This is a Dallas Oracle Users Group (DOUG) webinar presentation, recorded on 7…
Cary Millsap
New Method R Workbench features are always inspired by needs discovered on real projects. Two new features of the soon-to-be-released Workbench 9—the radically faster mrskew utility, and a new trace file cropping utility called mrcrop—make it faster and easier than ever to shred through millions of lines of Oracle trace data to find exactly what you need.…
Mark Williams
From Oracle Database 12.1 onward, the JDBC driver provides a convenient method called setClientInfo to set user session handle attributes in the database. There are three user session handle attributes that are useful when instrumenting your application so that it identifies itself and exposes its actions in Oracle Database (such as in the V$SESSION view):
Cary Millsap
Last month (June 2018), I presented at Kscope the story of how to make it easy to collect Oracle extended SQL trace data, so you can measure exactly how an Oracle-based application consumes its user’s time. The slides are available at SlideShare.net.
Cary Millsap
One of the more challenging types of performance problem is the dreaded scenario in which the problem occurs only intermittently and is difficult to trap with your performance measurement tools. In such a situation, trace data can be an irreplaceable ally, allowing you to understand even phenomena that you’ve not yet actually measured.