Using the middle tier to understand cross-tier delay in a multi-tier application

Understanding the cause of poor performance in a multi-tier enterprise application is challenging, because a performance bottleneck on any tier may cause the whole system to be under utilized, and to fail its throughput or quality of service goals. This paper presents an approach that focuses on the application server to identify bottlenecks in a multi-tier application that are caused by tiers other then the application server. The approach uses a performance tool, named SLICE, that selectively tracks method invocations that cross tier boundaries, and extracts contextual information associated with these invocations. SLICE also collects information from the operating system's scheduler to determine when a thread is blocked. Using the contextual information from method invocations and the information of when a thread is blocked from the operating system, SLICE computes cross tier delay. Experiments on DayTrader, a multi-tier application, show that performance bottlenecks caused by clients or database servers can be identified using cross tier delay.