Performance, Benchmarking and Sizing in Developing Highly Scalable Enterprise Software

Abstract

Performance and scalability are essential characteristics of large-scale enterprise software. This paper presents the technologies behind the processes implemented at SAP. During the specification, design and implementation phases, Performance Design Patterns are used as guidelines, which also define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for performance and scalability tests. With proven scalability of software applications, SAP’s Sizing Process enables the transformation of business requirements into hardware requirements. It also allows SAP’s customers to flexibly configure their specific applications, on operating system (OS), database (DB), and hardware platforms of their choice. The SAP Standard Application Benchmarks are developed and executed to test the scalability in extremely high load situations and to verify the sizing statements from the sizing process. They are also used for SAP internal regression tests across releases, and by SAP’s hardware partners for platform tests. Besides the response time centric performance testing, analysis and optimization, SAP follows a KPI-focused approach which permits potential performance problems to be reliably predicted already in simple and easy-to-execute tests. The SAP NetWeaver Portal Benchmark is used to demonstrate how to conduct performance and scalability tests using single user tests and load tests. We will introduce the KPIs used for Java memory analysis and optimization. Finally, this paper shows how the results of these tests can be used in hardware sizing in customer implementation projects.