With this Weblog I'd like to break the ice for a lively and diverse community developing around the subject matter of SAP Software Performance. Having good software performance is great, but what exactly do you mean by that? Ask this questions and often the stuttering begins. Ask business folks at a company what performance they expect from a SAP solution. They might answer processing a million sales documents in minutes on your well matured 2 processor server. End users might like sub-second response times for everything around the globe ... Yeah right, get real! This forum intends to help you defining performance in comprehensible terms. We can discuss what are the most useful questions to ask and how to manage expectations when discussing performance across diverse teams of developers, consultants, project managers, business folks, end users and more. You may want to ask: "How much would you like to invest in performance?" rather than "what performance levels do you want?". You can break down performance into (our favorite) terms: Response times, volume throughput/hardware sizing, scalability, stability and overload robustness in order to define performance more precise. These are just some simple warm up examples on the subject matter performance. OK, after we know now how to define performance and how to talk about it, we are put in charge of achieving good software performance. I bet the performance engineering "How to"-questions will become the biggest part of this forum. There are so many details along the whole SAP application software life cycle which need to be considered for achieving good performance. Luckily there is a really good chance that somebody else already found a solution to a particular performance problem you might have. So give it a shot and post your question in this forum. We have a fair number of moderators with strong and diverse software performance background who will answer your questions. Over time we hope that other performance specialists will join this forum and help us answering the questions too. I think I covered the main theme of software performance in the two paragraphs above. Instead of going on and on explaining more details about it, I just like to list a loosely, unstructured and incomplete software performance related keywords in order to give you some ideas and leave the rest to your questions and answers: Performance management, hardware capacity management, IT Governance (for Performance), ABAP/Java/NetWeaver/SOA/ESA performance, EP/KM/Webdynpro... performance, performance testing, stress testing, load testing, benchmarking, performance test methodology, performance test tools, performance requirements, performance tuning, LAN/WAN performance, Intra/Internet performance, network impact on application performance, Performance Service Level Agreements, production monitoring for performance, design+planning for performance, developing/implementing for performance, project management for performance, performance milestones.... Happy posting from the Performance Forum moderators.
