13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pp. 266-272
2011
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems form the backbone for the execution, controlling and management of business processes in today's large companies. Availability and performance of ERP systems is extraordinary critical for a company as even short unavailability or reduced throughput can be very costly. As companies are evolving, the number of applications and the kinds of applications that have to be supported are rising, which inherently also increases performance needs. However, the determination of what makes up the performance needs is critical. The performance of SAP ERP systems strongly depends on the usage of buffers for caching database contents. In order to predict the performance of SAP ERP systems, it is necessary to understand and measure the buffer usage of applications running on SAP ERP systems. In this work we explain the basic concepts and introduce a method for measuring the buffer usage of SAP ERP applications. This method will be illustrated by a case study where each step of a business process, executed on a SAP ERP system, will be analyzed according to the memory usage