If you want to improve your productivity, you must first identify the bottleneck in your system. The bottleneck is the part of your system that limits your ability to achieve peak performance. This can be a resource or an application process.
ContentsRemoving bottlenecksWhat is a bottleneck?How to identify bottlenecks?The 5 whys techniqueWhy did I have this problem?Why am I having this problem?Why is this does it happen?Why doesn't it always happen?What if…?How to identify your biggest bottlenecks?How to identify performer bottlenecks?How to identify system-based bottlenecks? How to unblock bottlenecks? ConclusionThere are several ways to find out where the bottleneck is in your system.
One way is to use the "bottleneck analysis tool" provided by Google. It lets you see where your system is spending its time. You can also use the "Time Profiler" feature in Visual Studio to analyze your code and determine where the bottlenecks are.
Once you've identified the parts of your system that are giving you trouble, you can take two approaches:
1) If you know what is causing the problem, try to fix it.
For example, if you think memory leaks are causing slowdowns, you need to figure out how to prevent them from happening. This may involve modifying your design so as not to create new objects unnecessarily, or even rewriting.
A bottleneck occurs when a component in your system takes too much CPU time. A good analogy would be traffic on a freeway.
When all lanes are congested, cars begin to back up behind each other until they reach their destination. In this case, the bottleneck is the road itself.
The same thing happens with computers. Your computer has many components such as processors, RAM, hard drives, etc., but only some of these components actually do useful work. These components are called resources. Resources include things like CPUs, disk space, network bandwidth, etc. You can build online using a computer system
Only certain combinations of resources will allow your computer to operate efficiently. For efficient system building, make sure to take the help of online pc builder.
When we talk about a bottleneck caused by a particular resource, we mean that the resource uses most of the available computing power. We call this situation a high load scenario because the amount of load placed on the resource is very large compared to the capacity of the resource.
To understand why a bottleneck exists, let's go back to our analogy with the car. Imagine driving down the highway and suddenly realize that every lane is saved.
Now imagine that you have three lanes to your destination and another three lanes for the return. This means that nine people are trying to get into your vehicle when only four seats are available. Clearly, something has to change!
In software systems, the equivalent of having multiple paths to your destination uses many different threads.
Each thread represents a separate task that must be completed before the next stage can begin. To make matters worse, the tasks sometimes overlap.
So instead of just 9 people wanting to get into your car, you could now have 18 people waiting to get in.
And since no matter how fast you drive, you can never accommodate everyone who wants to ride, you end up getting stuck in traffic.
In short, a bottleneck is any place in your program where you cannot meet demand.
One technique used to identify bottlenecks is the five whys method. It was developed by Toyota Motor Corporation and involves asking questions to help find the root causes of a problem. Here's how it works:
This question helps us understand the scope of the problem.
Is this due to user error?
Did someone else misuse my code?
Or maybe the bug occurred during testing. Whatever the reason, narrowing the scope makes it easier to find the solution.
Now that we know what happened, we need to understand why it happened. This question forces us to think outside the box. There may have been issues with the hardware or the operating environment. Maybe the app was not designed properly. If nothing obvious comes to mind, then we should ask if anything has changed recently.
Once we have identified the cause, we want to determine if these are common issues. For example, maybe all users encounter similar errors when performing specific actions. In other cases, however, one person may see a problem while others do not. When this happens, we need to dig deeper to find out what conditions lead to the problem occurring for each individual.
If we still haven't found the answer after five whys, then we need to go further.
What happens when the same thing happens again and again?
Is there some sort of pattern emerging from these incidents?
Are certain types of events more likely than others?
These are important considerations as we try to prevent future occurrences.
Finally, once we have determined the underlying reasons for the problem, we need to consider possible solutions. How could we fix things? Could we improve the current design? Can we add new features? We should also take note of the potential side effects. Does changing one part of the system affect other parts? Will adding more resources solve the problem? Only with careful consideration will we arrive at effective solutions.
To start identifying your biggest bottlenecks, first look at the most time-consuming operations within your application. You probably already know them – those long-running processes that seem to consume all available CPU cycles.
But do you really understand their impact on performance?
Do you know exactly how long they would run without being interrupted?
Or even better, do you know how many times per second they actually run?
The good news is that you can easily measure the running frequency of any process using PerfMon or iostat. To get started, open the Performance Monitor or System Activity Viewer, right-click on the Processes tab and select "New Column...". Then enter the process name in the Name column and its PID number in the ID column. Finally, set the Frequency field to display in seconds instead of milliseconds.
Next, let's look at another type of operation:those that require a lot of memory.
The reason I'm focusing on RAM here is that it's often overlooked by developers who only focus on CPU usage.
But just like processors, memory has an upper limit beyond which it cannot grow indefinitely.
As soon as the amount of free space reaches this point, applications begin to experience slowdowns due to thrashing.
This means that whenever data needs to be stored elsewhere, the application must perform disk accesses to know where to store it.
If the storage medium is not fast enough, the whole computer slows down until the next write is finished.
So what should you be looking for?
First, check the size of the working set. A large working set indicates that the program is constantly accessing different memory areas.
Now let's look at a third category of resource consumption:network bandwidth.
Network traffic consists of packets sent between two endpoints. The speed at which this occurs depends on several factors, including packet sizes, transmission rates, etc. But regardless of the specifics, each packet requires some processing overhead before it can be transmitted over the wire. This includes header analysis, checksum verification, payload encryption, and more. In addition to these overheads, there are also delays associated with sending and receiving messages. These include queuing, buffering, scheduling, routing, etc.
All in all, if you have lots of small packets from multiple sources, you'll likely experience high latency when trying to send/receive them. And since latency directly impacts response time, you may see poor user experiences.
Fortunately, measuring network throughput is easy. Just use Wireshark to capture traffic while performing some activities like web browsing. Once captured, analyze the resulting trace file to determine the average round-trip delay. If it takes more than 10ms to complete a request, then you have a problem!
And the other resources?
Apart from RAM, processors, and networks, there are many others that contribute to overall performance. For example, hard drives and SSDs consume power and generate heat. They aren't cheap either, so they need to be properly chilled.
Also keep in mind that many modern operating systems cache frequently used files locally rather than reading them from disks all the time. So even though the operating system may think the drive is idle, it may still be busy rewriting cached copies on the local machine.
Once you know what's causing the slowdown, how do you fix it? Well, first of all, make sure everything is working properly. Then start looking for ways to improve performance. Here are three common approaches:
1) Reduce CPU load
2) Increase available RAM
3) Improve network speed
The best way to avoid bottlenecks is to avoid them altogether. That said, sometimes we just don't have control over certain aspects of an app or website. When this happens, try to reduce their impact as much as possible. You can always add additional material later, but doing it now won't help.
