Documenting HTTP Performance Issues

Troubleshooting Application Problems I always tell people who attend my sessions that when you get those reports that “everything is slow”, you need to define two critical things before moving on; “what is everything and what is slow”? In most cases, “Everything” can be straight forward. The trick is to ask some specific questions to determine if it is all the applications, or just one. You should always ask the client if others are experiencing the same issue to identify bigger issues. I’ve seen many office where one person ‘calls in the issue’ regardless if it is just them having a problem or the entire office. When traditional monitoring tools don’t point to anything specific, you might have to get into the nitty-gritty packets. If you are extremely fortunate you might be able to capture packets from the server and client computer. If not, you will have to go back to your TAPS or SPAN ports to intercept the traffic. My methodology for this trace file will be different if some variables change. For example the client and server may be traversing a router, proxy, NAT or load balancer which requires a different approach. In this article I have Wireshark installed on the server and client computers and had the client simply download a file to get a baseline. In case you are new to my writings, I have to stress that you have to plan and properly calculate your transfer sizes.

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