This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance provides an in-depth, far-reaching and provocative consideration of how scholars and artists negotiate the theoretical, historical and practical politics of applied performance, both in the academy and beyond. These volumes offer insights from within and beyond the sphere of English-speaking scholarship, curated by regional experts in applied performance. The reader will gain an understanding of some of the dominant preoccupations of performance in specified regions, enhanced by contextual framing. From the dis(h)arming of the human body through dance in Colombia to clowning with dementia in Australia, via challenges to violent nationalism in the Balkans, transgender performance in Pakistan and resistance rap in Kashmir, the essays, interviews and scripts are eloquent testimony to the courage and hope of people who believe in the power of art to renew the human spirit. Students, academics, practitioners, policy-makers, cultural anthropologists and activists will benefit from the opportunities to forge new networks and develop in-depth comparative research offered by this bold, global project.

Annotation This publication is devoted to programming models, languages, and tools for performance-oriented program development in commercial and scientific environments. The included papers have been written based on presentations given at the workshop PADDA 2001. The goal of the workshop was to identify common interests and techniques for performance-oriented program development in commercial and scientific environments. Distributed architectures currently dominate the field of highly parallel computing. Distributed architectures, based on Internet and mobile computing technologies, are important target architectures in the domain of commercial computing too. The papers in this publication come from the two areas: scientific computing and commercial computing.

Because performance is paramount today, this thoroughly updated guide shows you how to test mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before you deploy them—whether it’s to the cloud or a mobile device. You’ll learn the complete testing process lifecycle step-by-step, along with best practices to plan, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Understand the importance of End User Monitoring (EUM) Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web applications, and web services Recognize and resolves issues often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with over 15 years’ experience with performance testing, The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises.

Application-level monitoring of continuously operating software systems provides insights into their dynamic behavior, helping to maintain their performance and availability during runtime. Such monitoring may cause a significant runtime overhead to the monitored system, depending on the number and location of used instrumentation probes. In order to improve a system’s instrumentation and to reduce the caused monitoring overhead, it is necessary to know the performance impact of each probe. While many monitoring frameworks are claiming to have minimal impact on the performance, these claims are often not backed up with a detailed performance evaluation determining the actual cost of monitoring. Benchmarks can be used as an effective and affordable way for these evaluations. However, no benchmark specifically targeting the overhead of monitoring itself exists. Furthermore, no established benchmark engineering methodology exists that provides guidelines for the design, execution, and analysis of benchmarks. This thesis introduces a benchmark approach to measure the performance overhead of application-level monitoring frameworks. The core contributions of this approach are 1) a definition of common causes of monitoring overhead, 2) a general benchmark engineering methodology, 3) the MooBench micro-benchmark to measure and quantify causes of monitoring overhead, and 4) detailed performance evaluations of three different application-level monitoring frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the approach and validate the benchmark results. The developed benchmark is available as open source software and the results of all experiments are available for download to facilitate further validation and replication of the results.

Application Performance Management (APM) in the Digital Enterprise enables IT professionals to be more successful in managing their company’s applications. It explores the fundamentals of application management, examines how the latest technological trends impact application management, and provides best practices for responding to these changes. The recent surge in the use of containers as a way to simplify management and deploy applications has created new challenges, and the convergence of containerization, cloud, mobile, virtualization, analytics, and automation is reshaping the requirements for application management. This book serves as a guide for understanding these dramatic changes and how they impact the management of applications, showing how to create a management strategy, define the underlying processes and standards, and how to select the appropriate tools to enable management processes. Offers a complete framework for implementing effective application management using clear tips and solutions for those responsible for application management Draws upon primary research to give technologists a current understanding of the latest technologies and processes needed to more effectively manage large-scale applications Includes real-world case studies and business justifications that support application management investments