Tune-up and oil change
Bryn Pears, managing consultant at Oakton agrees with Simon about the importance of getting to the bottom of the problem. “Application architectures have become vastly more complex,” he says, and unless you understand the system and identify the real bottlenecks “you’re fixing things that aren’t broken, or beefing up links that aren’t weak.”
A company operating an outsourced dispatching service consulted Oakton because its home-grown operations system was failing under peak loads. The problem was that the application was opening a new connection to an Oracle database for every request made by users. After tuning the Oracle configuration to make optimal use of the memory installed in the Windows NT server, 30 percent more connections could be opened simultaneously. Other changes were made to improve performance, and although a hardware upgrade was still required, the result was sufficient to keep the company running until the new equipment was commissioned.
Another Oakton client, a major energy company using Oracle Financials, provides an extreme case of the results that can be achieved with skilled tuning. Based on a subset of the data, the company had estimated that its fixed assets end-of-month reporting would take 32 days to process. The problem was that older versions of the Oracle E-business Suite “didn’t scale well” for very large numbers of assets, Pears says. By making adjustments such as ensuring that smaller indexes were searched before larger ones, Oakton was able to reduce the time needed to produce the reports to two hours. “Obviously the results aren’t always that dramatic,” says Pears, “five to 10 percent is more typical.”
“Often the first response . . . is beefing up the hardware, but hardware isn’t really cheap,” he says, suggesting that $15,000 spent on expert advice can be more effective than $150,000 worth of hardware.
But some organisations find it easier to justify the purchase of new hardware rather than expenditure on software or services, says Sal Ciardulli, systems consultant manager at Quest Software. For that reason, one company spent $500,000 on extra hardware to overcome what was really a tuning problem that could have been fixed for a fraction of that cost.
Don’t overlook the software vendor as a source for tuning advice. “Organisations [consulting firms] that implement the application for a certain amount of money ensure they make a profit,” says Ray Whitfield, director of Oracle Consulting. Oracle makes its profits from licensing the software, so it has to make sure it works well. “We’re a products company . . . we just happen to have a services arm.”
One telco had another organisation perform an Oracle installation, but wasn’t satisfied by the system’s performance. Oracle Consulting did a review, identified problems relating to the installation itself and a lack of staff training, and the company now acts as an Oracle reference site and is installing other modules. “Oracle stands by the client,” says Whitfield, pointing to five recent cases where the company has fixed inadequate installations done by others.
“You obviously can’t tune everything for maximum performance,” he says. The best strategy is to identify and address the most critical functions: trimming an hour from the time needed to run the payroll might not make any difference to the business, but instant response might be essential when dealing with a customer.
Oracle uses various tools to locate bottlenecks, but the experience of its staff in identifying trouble spots is also important. “Sometimes some code has to be written . . . sometimes in older applications some of the customisations are a problem,” says Whitfield, who explains that more recent Oracle products use a different mechanism for creating customer-specific functions so they do not impact on future upgrades.
