Within SAP the Performance and Scalability group has the focus to promote skills and expertise around high-performance software programming and ensure that SAP software is both performance-optimized and designed to capitalize on the latest hardware and technology trends with regards to performance, scalability and resource optimization.
There are three key areas we are taking care of:
Performance
Performance and Scalability are essential characteristics of large-scale enterprise software. Performance can be considered both from a system point of view, and a user point of view. While system administrators are interested in achieving required system throughput with a limited IT budget, the end users are seeking reasonable response time when interacting with software systems. Acceptable response times are of course related to the content of business processing.
Performance refers to the total effectiveness of a computer system, including throughput, individual response time, and availability. Programming for good performance thus means making conservative use of critical resources, keeping response time at a minimum, taking into consideration aspects of network communication, as well as ensuring the scalability of the software.
Scalability, in most general terms, means the degree to which a scenario, component or system can be expanded (and reduced) in size, volume, or number of users served and continue to function properly and predictably. In other words scalability refers to the predictable resource consumption of a software application under different system load, while the response time remains in the reasonable range.
Sizing
With proven scalability of software applications, SAP's sizing process enables the transformation of business requirements into hardware requirements. The size of the hardware and database is influenced by both business aspects and technological aspects. This means that the number of users using the various application components and the data load they put on the network must be taken into account.
Sizing means determining the hardware requirements of an SAP System such as network bandwidth, physical memory, CPU power, and I/O capacity. SAP provides a wide range of tools how these hardware requirements can be determined.
Benchmarks
SAP Standard Application Benchmarks reflect standard business scenarios and are used to measure all performance relevant parameters. Every SAP Standard Application Benchmark consists of a number of script files that simulate typical and popular transactions and workflows in a specific business scenario. During the benchmark run, all areas of an SAP system are tested, for example, CPU, memory, the I/O system, network load, functional errors, and system availability. In detail, benchmark key figures include database request times, wait times, CPU utilization, average dialog response time by a given number of benchmark users and the achieved throughput.
For these key areas we would like to publish information on a permanent basis.
Please visit our updated homepage: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/performance-analysis
