The Eight Factors of Cloud Native Gemfire Applications

If after moving the in memory JVM cache to Gemfire your pain still hasn't gone away take a look at this checklist of factors for getting you app to perform efficiently with Gemfire. Thanks to my buddy Jeff Ellin who is a expert ninja at Gemfire and PCC.

TL;DR

Look at queries and data. If you have a read problem then the query is not constructed correctly or the data is not partitioned correctly. If its a write problem it's probably a cluster tuning issue, network issue or some bad synchronous listeners that have been implemented. The best way to triage this is to  take some stats files you can be loaded up into vsd. Gemfire keeps a lot of statistics you can visualize. You can see throughput of various operations.

Here are some of the other things you should probably look at.

1. Data Partitioning 
2. Non index lookups 
3. Serialization 
4. Querying on the server they should be using PDX for OQL Queries. If you aren’t using PDX the server needs to deserialize the object to do the query. Any time you query for data that isn’t the key you are using OQL 
5. Data Colocation strategy of data (customer orders should be on the same partition as customer record, reference data should be replicated) 
6. Leveraging Transactions Incorrectly (all objects must be in the same partition). Make your operations idempotent instead of relying on transactions. 
7. Excessive GC activity due to data changing too frequently. 
8. If networking sucks performance will suck due to the amount of replication - In rare cases you may need to enable Delta Propagation if the objects being serialized are big . also read When to avoid delta propogation. For each region where you are using delta propagation, choose whether to enable cloning using the delta propagation property cloning-enabled. Cloning is disabled by default. See Delta Propagation Properties. If you do not enable cloning, review all associated listener code for dependencies on EntryEvent.getOldValue. Without cloning, GemFire modifies the entry in place and so loses its reference to the old value. For delta events, the EntryEvent methods getOldValue and getNewValue both return the new value.