System performance has a direct impact on user productivity and business value. The accuracy and satisfaction of interactive users is affected by their perceptions of system performance and response time. In addition, some applications have deadlines or cutoffs with direct business impacts, and must have sufficient capacity and performance to handle peak arrivals of new work.

By following good design and development practices, development teams help assure that their PRPC applications provide both satisfactory interactive response and high throughput. Built-in facilities provide performance insights at both the summary and detailed level to those resources that may be in tight supply. Bottlenecks hurting performance can occur in computations (CPU), memory, database operations, network bandwidth, or client workstation processing.

During development, PRPC provides immediate warnings about recently saved rules that potentially may hurt performance. Similarly, the system immediately reports any processing steps that exceed (in elapsed time, number of bytes, or other dimensions) predefined threshold values. To support ongoing monitoring and tuning of performance of production systems, two facilities — the System Management application and the Autonomic Event Services product — operate externally to monitor, summarize and diagnose performance issues for one or multiple systems.