Beyond Performance Testing by:

Now that you know what the bottleneck is functionally and where it is architecturally, you’re ready to track down the cause. If you’ve made it this far, none of your other tests have isolated the bottleneck sufficiently to resolve it. That’s what exploiting bottlenecks is all about. According to Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus (Third Edition, 1995), to exploit is “to put into action or use: actuate, apply, employ, exercise, implement, practice, use, utilize. ” You exploit a bottleneck by building very specific tests that exercise the weakness in the system as an aid to the tuning effort. This article concludes the four-article group on the theme “finding bottlenecks to tune. ” This is the last step down the tuning path where the performance test engineer serves as the lead. By the conclusion of this article, you should be confident in your ability to work with the development team to identify and exploit areas of concern in a way that adds significant value to the overall development process