Application Performance Issues

How to resolve the performance issues that your application might experience when tested with Seeker.

Summary

  • Category: Application performance
  • Severity/Impact: Critical
  • Status: Known issue

Symptoms

The application fails to start, is unusably slow, becomes unresponsive, or crashes.

Causes

A Seeker Agent monitors the running application and communicates with the Seeker server. This will always involve a certain performance overhead typically in the range of 10-20%. However, in some cases the overhead might be higher, causing the application to underperform. This can happen for a number of possible reasons, for example:

Cause Resolution
Overhead caused by the Active Verification and Active Inspection features.

These features create additional load for the application by sending requests with modified payloads or headers.

 Try one of the following:
  • Disable Active Verification. This will automatically disable Active Inspection.
  • Leave Active Verification enabled, but disable it for requests that perform data change operations.
  • To enable or disable Active Verification for some parts of your application, configure exclusion rules.

For instructions, see Configure Active Verification, Configure Active Inspection.
Overhead caused by other advanced features

Features such as Activity Monitoring, Cross-Project Analysis, Data Flow Map, Rapid Scan Static, Sampling, Stack Trace Capture,and Software Composition Analysis create additional load for the application by generating extra communications between the Agent and the server or extra background activity.

These features might trigger a lot of application error handling by sending extra unexpected requests.

Disable all the following features, and see if performance improves. If it does, reenable the features one-by-one to identify those that cause the performance issue.
For instructions, see:
Excessive logging

The levels of server and/or Agent event logging have been configured too low, which might create very large logs.

 Set the logging levels to INFO.

For instructions, see Configure Logging Levels.
Excessive data collection

Seeker collects too many detections for the application to handle effectively in addition to its normal functionality.

 Identify the checkers that generate too many detections, disable the irrelevant ones, and refine aggregation rules for the relevant.

For instructions, see Checker Configuration.
Insufficient CPU and memory system resources

Application performance might degrade when system resources are insufficient for the combined needs of application and Agent.

Adjust your application server's CPU and memory allocations according to your deployment size.

For instructions, see Performance Considerations.