Spring release success story – Getronics team

- Bhushan Patil.

It takes immense pleasure for me to announce that Getronics team had yet another successful release. All these should be attributed to the team’s efforts and dedication. Everybody in the team new or old chipped in with valuable contributions for the release.

Nishant and Pragnesh contributed on a most complicated tasks planned for the spring release. Although there was last minute overhaul of the task but this did not deter their zeal to complete the task in time. Nishant’s contribution and support for team members during development and test weeks was indeed laudable.

Rashid worked on a task that added a feature for the end users to use quick links in, other words – favorites. Branko did acknowledge his efforts and work. This is a plus for a relatively new person in the team. Also the other tasks he worked on were executed very well.

Chintan is the most extravagant asset of this team. He has been instrumental in addressing production issues, helping others in more than one way. His contribution to DMS Online for this release was to enhance performance. I would not shy away to say that the gain was significant. The statistics are very impressive. Marco expressed happiness about this during our post release presentation.

Sandip, the database powerhouse for the team. You name a problem with database and Sandip is up to it. He contributed with important piece of work with HTML order forms in emails, database schema review with other team members and Emile, for metadata and many other tasks. Even our customer looks up to him for database challenges.

Sandeep Yadav a new entrant in team for this release has been instrumental and an understated member. He has contributed largely in this very short span.

Lastly Shailaja did a good job with testing, had it not been her application testing early in the release cycle we would not have been able to deliver a good release.

Anup’s and Amith’s contribution cannot be undermined, although they were here for short period for this release they played a vital role in some of the technical aspects of tasks executed in this release.

First time in last 2.5 years of our association with Getronics (earlier KPN); we received a complimentary message from the main stakeholder from customer’s end. Following are his words

“I also wanted to let you know that I'm impressed with the work you've done on the coming spring release and the improvements that were made in functionality, user friendliness and performance.

I think you did a good job on this, my compliments!”

- Marco Braam, on Spring 2011 release.

Finally I would like to congratulate the team for all their efforts. And these efforts will certainly boost morale and expectations for the upcoming Autumn 2011 release and team lets live up to the expectations, I’m sure we will. I would be more than happy to see such complementary emails more often.

All this success came in turbulent times when we lost few of the important personnel from the team. So I would like to thank the team for standing tall in this period, supporting each other and delivering such a commendable release.

To conclude I would also like to thank and congratulate all those who supported us internally as well as externally.

Editorial June 2011

Hello all,

With temperatures rising everywhere day by day we are all waiting eagerly for monsoons! Everybody likes to get showers of rain after blistering summer. Rain is not a result of a single day; after experiencing heat for 4 months, we get showers in the form of a blessing. Similarly success is not achieved in a single day but it is a continues journey of efforts.

It is same as doing hard work for months and one fine day receiving an award, makes you feel like “I have done it”. A smile of satisfaction on the face motivates us to walk one more mile to conquer the next milestone.

Apart from regular on the spot awards, Mitesh has organized an intriguing and informative session, “Innovative Technical Appearance”. We had good response with a total of 25 participations.  Although in today’s era of information technology, we all are aware of latest happenings around the world and especially in technology; such presentations on innovative topics gives a platform for sharing new information.  It also helped many Decosians to improve presentation skill and to overcome stage fear. There have been professional trainings conducted on improving presentation, communication skills. I must say this is the step towards creating dynamic Decosian along with intelligent technical brains.

Along with awards, appreciating individuals and the team is very important. Bhushan Patil shares success story of his team; don’t forget to read.

Celebration is always welcome and this month we have 15 birthdays’ to celebrate and enjoy. So a chocolate every alternate day? J

I am happy to say that bringing minds together section which we started in the last month has an immense response. In last release, this page has got maximum hits.  This time we have Sanket, who shares his experience. I am sure we all will enjoy reading it.

Finally let’s welcome 3 new members to our Decos family. It’s growing every month.

Thanks,

Subodh Patil.

Bringing Minds Together June11

My trip to Netherlands

By Sanket Mistry.

I always feel that a trip to the Netherlands is an ongoing learning process for me. I have been working with Decos since last 5 years. Ever since I joined Decos, I have been associated with DDWE product. Since this is an in house product, engineers from DSE Team often have to travel to the Netherlands. Thought this was not my first trip to Netherlands but it was my first time to be in New Decos Headquarter. This time, weather was pleasant and for the first time I was not wearing jacket when I was outside the houseJ.

As Suraj said in his article last month, the new office is outstanding and gives you a different feeling altogether. New Office also has a unique interior and furniture for each meeting rooms.

Most of us may find it difficult to have tasty homemade food in NL. However it is a different culture so one must try the new variety of food.

Suraj and I had lot of fun playing Tennis in NL. The highlight was a Tennis match between me and Suraj against Marco and Gerhard. For fun we were playing it as though it was a “Rematch of India vs Netherlands Cricket match”.  Finlay Suraj and I emerged as winners. J


 

The presence of Vaibhav and Parashar made it more the merry and we visited to Dolphinarium in Harderwijk. We saw the dolphin show and Killer whale which we enjoyed a lot.

This was the first time I was also a part of support in Netherlands. I used to sit outside the cabin of Product development team. The customer site consultant was giving me a call and asking for solutions. This whole experience made me realized that there is another view of software as well. At this stage, you do not have Visual Studio to start debugging on Client server or client. Your tools should be either Error log or Data base log. This helped me understand the gap between customer’s view point and engineer’s view point.

During my second last week Berend, Mathew and I went to Prague located in Czech Republic. It was almost 950 KM journey one way. Berend drove me there. And I was thrilled when he was driving @ 185 Km/H in GermanyJ. We started @ 4.30 PM on Friday and reached there @ 2 AM Saturday. At 9 AM we started roaming around and I was amazed by the history they have still preserved. Czech people feel very proud to have preserved their history. I came to know lot of facts about Jewish culture. Prague is a very beautiful city full of ancient buildings and castles. I really enjoyed my stay over there. If you are in Netherlands this is one place you must visit.

During my final week, I was invited by Moniek to her place to have dinner; we were accompanied by Erik and Gert-Jaap. We saw “The Hangover” @ her place and then we played Formula-D for a while which is an interesting board game. I have lot of friends there to hang out with and this made me feel at home.

I always like being in Netherlands but we all know that it’s always great to be back Home in INDIA.

CLR Profiler

Monitor .NET application performance with the CLR Profiler

 

 

-By Santanu Tripathy  

Abstract

CLR Profiler is a free and incredibly useful tool offered by Microsoft.  This article examines this CLR (Common Language Runtime) Profiler—that you may use to track down memory issues.

One of the important factors for performance degradation in .NET code is memory consumption. Many developers just concentrate on execution time to determine performance bottle necks in a .NET application. Only measuring execution time does not clearly give idea of where the performance issue resides. Ok, said and done one of the biggest tasks is to understand which function; assembly or class has consumed how much memory. In this article we will see how we can find which functions consume how much memory.

CLR Profiler Goal

To Identify:

·         Which methods allocate which types of objects?

·         Which objects survive?

·         What is on the heap?

·         What keeps objects alive?

·         Who is calling whom how often?

·         Which methods, classes, and modules get pulled in by whom?

The data used by the CLR Profiler is stored in self-contained log files. The application provides both Windows client and command-line interfaces.

A log file is created once profiling has been stopped. You can see various graphs/reports called views to get an idea of memory usage by the profiled application. The views allow you to track object creation, memory consumed by objects, heap size, the type of objects created, and so forth. This is all available via graphs, so the data is friendly to the eyes (as opposed to scanning a log file).

Download and details:

The download is comprised of a single installation program that places the tool on your system. In addition, extensive documentation is included. The CLR Profiler allows you to take a peek under the hood of a .NET application and see what is happening as it runs.

§  Download CLR Profiler: .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, .NET 4.0

§  CLR Profiler usage guide

Steps involved in profiling ASP.NET application:

1. Run CLR Profiler.exe. The following screen appears

     ii.            Go to File Menu. From the options available, select ‘Profile ASP.NET’. This stops IIS Admin Services which stops other dependant services (World Wide Web Publishing Services). Then World Wide Web Publishing Service is restarted. The following screen then appears:

The File menu is very straightforward:

• Open Log File lets you open and analyze a log file you saved from an earlier run.
• Profile Application lets you start and profile a normal .exe application.
• Profile ASP.NET lets you start and profile an ASP.NET application.
• Profile Service lets you start and profile a managed service.
• Save Profile As lets you save your current profile for later.
• Set Parameters lets you set command-line parameters and a working directory.
• Exit (or clicking the Close button) lets you quit CLRProfiler.

   iii.            At this point, start the application in the browser (Open a new browser window) Note: Do not refresh an already opened application.

    iv.            Browse all the pages you want in your web site, and then from the CLR Profiler application click on “Kill ASP.NET”

      v.            Finally, the following summary report is generated. Automatically a report detail screen is generated.

    vi.            Click on selected button to see the process allocation per function in your project. You can also click on the histogram buttons and see memory usage.

 vii.            Right click on the screen to see the available options:  Select Filters: Filtering is important to simplify complicated graphs.

§  You can filter on both types and methods. For example, if you wanted to find out only who allocates all the System.Int32 [] arrays, you would enter the filter shown in the following screen shot.

§  On the other hand, if you want to see everything allocated directly from Demo1::Main, use the filter shown in the following screen shot.

Note that the Show Callees/Referenced Objects checkbox has also been cleared. This causes the view to show only objects allocated from Demo1::Main directly, and not all the objects allocated by methods called from Demo1::Main.

Zooming is another interesting feature useful for complicated graphs. Zoom allows you to see the connections of a node quickly - you select the node and choose Zoom to Node from the shortcut menu (or, even quicker, you can double-click on the node).

Histogram Allocated Types

The below histogram shows the memory allocated per type.

Steps involved in profiling Windows Applications:

Clicking the Start Application button or selecting Profile Application from the File menu brings up an Open dialog box that allows you to select the exe file.  Wait till the application is launched by CLR Profiler. Rest of the steps is similar to ASP.Net profiling.

Summary

In this article, we walked through a memory performance investigation for the common case where the memory consumption is dominated by the .NET GC heap. Using the free and downloadable CLR Profiler, we were easily able to get snapshots of the GC heap at various points in the application and compare the snapshots with one another. With CLR Profiler, it is easy to perform audits (it takes only a few minutes) and should be part of the development lifecycle of every application. Following are the key benefits of CLR Profiling:

• Statistical profiler
• Provides detailed insight into application memory usage
• Dynamic instrumentation through JIT
• Graphical overview of memory allocation on heap, method calls, time line charts and garbage collection detail

As a precaution: Never use CLR Profiler at production servers for profiling production applications/websites/services! It will slowdown them during profiling.