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

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?

Improve Performance of Grails Queries in MySQL

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