Over the last two weeks, data entry personnel at XYZ Corporation have been mentioning some slight but noteworthy delays in performing routine updates to records on the company's production system. On one day an update process might go fine, but the next day a similar transaction might take 30 to 40 seconds longer to complete. From a user's perspective, this delay is an annoying problem.
From a system administrator's perspective, it is a bit of a mystery. The administrator can consult the system's problem log, only to find that it has been several months since there has been an application or system problem of this kind reported. This new performance issue is of concern because any indication of a performance weakness could become a real performance problem if the administrator does not determine the source of the problem as soon as possible.
