Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

What engineering leaders need to know from this year’s Google I/O

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I didn’t intentionally aim to create a rhyming title, but there you have it. Each year, I look forward to Google I/O like a kid going back to school. This year was no exception. I watched as many videos as I could that were related to App Quality, Firebase Crashlytics, and Jetpack Compose. Here’s what I think engineering leaders should know.

Key takeaways

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Android: Overdraw, What is it and Why Should You Care?

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I recently read this blog post,  Android Performance Case Study by Romain Guy, on profiling an application that he used regularly to determine why there were occasional hiccups.  I used one of the tools he recommended, Debug GPU Overdraw, to see how the PostTV Application was behaving. With one minor tweak I was able to reduce the overdraw by 1x.  So what does overdraw mean anyway?

Overdraw is when you draw pixels on top of each other potentially effecting the speed with which your application draws views on the screen.  Ideally you don’t want to have more than “2.5 times the number of pixels on screen per frame.”  And the different colors each represent how many times the pixel has been painted on the screen.

Taken directly from Romain’s post:


So by simply removing the background color that was assigned to my main layout, I was able to get a 1x overdraw instead of a 2x. Which is why most of the app is now a happy blue color!

 

Monitor Hibernate Cache Statistics in Grails Application v2

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In an earlier post I wrote about monitoring your cache hits in a Grails Application using a programmatic approach, this time I will show you how to use jconsole and have it done for you automatically.

All you need to do is start your Grails Application: grails run-app. Then start jconsole and choose your running Grails’ process. Go over to the MBeans tab and navigate to the area of your application server where you can see the cache.

What I really love about this is that you can perform actions in your application and watch the cache hits over time.

Improve Performance of Grails Queries in MySQL

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A web application that I was developing would become extremely slow as the number of requests increased per minute. I couldn’t figure out why because with my local database everything seemed fine. Here is the process that I used in MySQL to determine the bottleneck in my database. The final problem was a missing index on a table that was used in the where clause of a select statement over and over again. I included a snapshot the MySQL Process list at the end of the post. Hope this helps someone.

Steps to Follow:

  • show full processlist;
    • shows each database connection that has been allocated for your database
    • contains the time a connection has been Sleep
    • contains how long a Query is taking to execute, you want this to be less than a second ideally
  • describe <query>;
    • this gives you the database’s plan for executing the query
    • you want the number of rows that will be looked at to be as small as possible
  • show index from <table>;
    • this will list all indices contained on a table
    • this is a quick way to discover if you are missing a key index that could improve query performance
  • create index <tablename_fieldname_idx> on <table>(field);
    • this will add a new index to a table

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