performance tuning

In the spirit of New Year's resolutions, I'm going to try to provide as many tips of the week as I can. There are weeks when I might get too busy, but I'll sincerely try to post a small hint or trick that will be helpful to web developers. Tips may be about load testing, performance testing, performance tuning, stress testing, or anything related to web application development.

Performance Reference Point

I saw a tweet today that referenced web performance improvement, and that linked me to an interesting post on Developer.com.

I was in a meeting this morning with our development team, and we have a desire to run some load tests against Drupal. We want to find out how Drupal performs on a standard Amazon EC2 small instance. We believe LoadStorm can do a good job of stressing an out-of-the-box Drupal application implementation. Not sure if we want to use a LAMP or MS stack yet, and we are open for suggestions.

Anybody interested in this type of tech study?

It depends. Stress testing tools can be invaluable for finding the breaking point for a web application. But even the best tool and test plan won't fix the problem.

The purpose of stress and load testing is to discover. Measuring response time and errors relative to user volume can point to solutions; however, the developer(s) must engage in performance tuning to eliminate bottlenecks or otherwise improve throughput.