Registering Custom Resource Intensive Scenarios to CLM Applications

There is no such thing as limitless computing power. This is an unfortunate truth that can cause problems running the CLM and other tools, as the usage grows. To understand what systems actually do when getting under heavy load, more and more monitoring was introduced over the last years. Resource intensive scenarios where identified and the CLM tools have capabilities to record information about their frequency and duration. Plan loading and SCM compare workspace are examples in the product.

Custom Resource Intensive Scenarios

In addition to resource intensive scenarios that are built in, it is also possible to introduce custom resource intensive scenarios. Some examples are:

• Custom automation that execute long running operations on work items, SCM data, requirements, test artifacts. Typical scenarios are custom export/import, mass updates, custom analysis of source code, baselines, linked work items.
• Follow up actions
• Long running custom dashboards

This is by no means a comprehensive list. It is possible to bring your clients and servers to their knees with custom themes that do not scale, by work item attribute customization adding more and more custom attributes, JavaScript providers, value providers with thousands of values to choose from and other customization.

What is your server up to?

When users complain about performance problems, even if a server is getting overloaded, it is hard to find the root causes, because a typical server does so many things.

Monitoring that has been added over time has helped, but it is still hard. It is sometimes even hard to understand the situation. As an example for how complex this can become. Users complained about performance.

Our performance architect looked at the server load and the build load and a huge amount of calls that we were not able to account for. The server was unarguably under heavy load created by builds, but the build users and SCM users where not complaining. The developers we talked to had no real issues. Some users, at a different location, using work items and running work item queries, had.

Because we could not explain the inconsistent feedback, I finally went to the location where the users where complaining. I met the users followed their day to day work and found the work item performance unacceptable. The web browser was even locking up on them.

Knowing this, we were able to reproduce the use case, and look into what happened. We found that the work item load was slow, especially on slow laptops, because it had to load so many team areas and iterations. This was specific to how the project area was configured and used.

We also found that the browser flooded the server with requests that where definitely not part of what the product UI sent. This basically forced the Web Browser to process and cache thousands of calls, reserving more and more memory and exhausting the CPU capabilities of the relatively weak laptops used by the users that complained.

The final verdict was, that there was a custom extension to the theme that created all these calls. It took us weeks and was luck that we found this out. If we had known there was such an extension, we would have been able to find this a lot faster. The server was still under a heavy build load, but the performance issue reported was not related to that.

Needless to say that this extension was also deployed in other environments. If it had a detrimental impact, it was heavily depended on the timeline and iteration structure of a project area. The more and deeper the worse.

It would have helped if we could have seen the extension working, and see how long it worked would also have helped.

Registering Custom Resource Intensive Scenarios

The same mechanism that is used to register resource intensive scenarios in the product code can be used to register custom resource intensive scenarios. Unfortunately, we where lacking a good description and supporting code that we could provide customers to use it for their extensions.

This has now changed. Some colleagues and I, independently, started creating a customer usable description how to register resource intensive scenarios. A colleague wrote some cURL code to do this. I wrote Java code to do this and started creating a presentation. When we found out, we decided to combine the effort. Here the result.

The Deployment Wiki page Register Custom Scripts as a Resource Intensive Scenario, explains, using an example, how the API works in general. It also explains how to retrieve and monitor this information.

Then it provides example code to perform this using cURL, Eclipse Lyo OSLC4J based java code, and RTC Plain Java Client Libraries based Java Code.

The Java Code comes with main classes to run it. This is basically example code, but it can also be directly used in command line based automation.

Open Source Code

Disclaimer and Download

Any code downloadable or accessible in this post is provided as is, without support, and used at your own risk. Part of the code was developed in Java using Eclipse and is based on the Eclipse Lyo Client. This was published as open source, under
 Eclipse Public License – v 1.0, in the incredible (mostly German speaking) Jazz Community and can be found here: custom-expensive-scenario-notifier-oslc4j.

Another part of the code was developed in Java using Eclipse and is based on the Plain Java Client Libraries. This was published as open source, under MIT license, in the incredible (mostly German speaking) Jazz Community and can be found here: custom-expensive-scenario-notifier-plainjava.

See the other examples the Deployment Wiki page Register Custom Scripts As a Resource Intensive Scenario.

How does it work?

There is basically a REST API to register the start and the stop of a scenario. All there is to register the start of the scenario at the beginning and then register the stop, after you are done. See Register Custom Scripts as a Resource Intensive Scenario for more details on the code.

What should your automation do?

If you have written automation tools or extensions, you should use the methods described in Register Custom Scripts as a Resource Intensive Scenario, to register your extension as an resource intensive scenario. Add the code to register the start and stop in a way that allows for disabling it easily.

Monitor the various resource intensive scenarios over time. For a scenario that takes only a fraction of a second, you could temporarily disable the registration. Scenarios that take a second or longer should continue to be monitored.

Related

Feedback

If you have questions around the Custom Resource Intensive Scenario code, ask them in the Jazz.net forum instead of commenting on the article or this blog post. Tag the question as a clm question and add the tag: custom-resource-intensive-scenarios to mark it for the reader.

Summary

Please use the method above to enhance your automation and extensions to allow monitoring their duration, frequency and deviation.

As always I hope this helps users out there with the Jazz products.