As we begin another week of summer, here are a few helpful links for articles concerning issues of interest to us load and performance testers. We at LoadStorm have been busy the past month with many new customers asking us for help.

We like people, and we like web performance testing. And we really like people that like web performance testing! Our focus is on providing the best value load testing tool. That said, we often get requests from clients that want us to assist them with understanding the best way to go about it. Some want us to coach them as they figure out what to do about poorly performing web applications. In any case, we certainly enjoy working with customers to make their sites run better.

While we know that we aren't a fit for everyone, it has become clear over the past 18 months that we are helping a bunch of people. Thank you to each client that has sent us a testimonial or even referred us to your geek friends. We sincerely appreciate the word of mouth support we have been getting.

When we say things like, "Please let us know if we can help in any way", we mean it. Seriously. So don't hestitate to tell us if you have questions or need some coaching around performance testing.

In the meantime, we offer these links to other writers and vendors that may be useful to you as you tune & test your web applications.

Performance of the World Cup Site

Verifying FIFA World Cup Web Site against Performance Best Practices

Andreas Grabner predicts that the World Cup site will fail. The site has poor performance to start with, and Andreas applies some engineering best practices from which all of us can learn.

"My analysis of the FIFA site shows that – once the World Cup starts next week and the site gets really hit by millions of users around the globe – there is a big chance the site will run into performance and scalability issues due to several best practices that my analysis shows the site does not follow. This failure causes load times of the initial page take more than 8 seconds and requires downloads of more than 200 elements. These problems can easily be fixed by following the recommendations I highlight in this blog."

I especially appreciate how Andreas breaks down the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) into groups, then he shows where each metric is a problem for the FIFA site. He makes great suggestions for where to look for improvement.

He gives the World Cup site a failing grade for overall performance. In looking at the 4 categories he uses for measurement, none got a good grade.

• Browser Caching: F – 175 images have a short expires header, 4 have a header in the past
• Network: F – 201 Requests in total, 1 Redirect, 1 HTTP 400, duplicated image requests on different domains
• Server-Side: C - 10 App-Server Requests with a total of 3.6s -> analyze server-side processing
• JavaScript: D - Use CSS Lookups by ID instead of Class Name

  
  
  
  

  Cloud Does NOT Mean Infinite Scalability

  Scale and Scalability: Rethinking the Most Overused IT System Selling Point for the Cloud Era
  Scott Fulton does a nice job dispelling some myths about cloud computing. Application performance is vital to companies today because of the dollars tied to websites, back office systems, and many forms of business automation. New start-ups utilizing cloud infrastructures are quickly coming out of the gate with disruptive technologies that process huge volumes of data for an ever-increasing user base.

  We geeks have been saying for years, "you can't just throw hardware at the problem." Scott says:

  "If you believe that a scalable architecture for an information system, by definition, gives you more output in proportion to the resources you throw at it, then you may be thinking a cloud-based deployment could give your existing system “infinite scalability.” Companies that are trying out that theory for the first time are discovering not just that the theory is flawed, but that their systems are flawed… and now they’re calling out for help."

  Business people are waking up to the fact that scalability is as important to their success as capitalism and democracy. They usually don't know how important scalability is until their system fail. After customers and revenue are lost, then they look into the underlying causes and find their systems don't really have the performance capability they thought. So in typical manager decision making, they use money to solve the problem by re-deploying on a cloud infrastructure to get much more horsepower. Unfortunately, it is NOT that simple. Cloud platforms are not magic. There are thousands of variables in the scalability equation, and the cloud with massive virtualization is only one factor to improve performance.

  Sometimes the solution is to re-architect the system. In fact, Twitter has re-architected their system 4 times already. An academic may tell us to plan for growth, think through all the possibilities and produce the most scalable system from the beginning. Yeah, good idea. But it just isn't that easy because there are too many moving parts. Many of the moving parts are on moving platforms that are getting better, faster, cheaper by the month. Scott tells us to do the best we can with what we have now, and then always be looking ahead for ways to improve performance - including throwing away what you have to build a more scalable application architecture.

  Bradford Stephens calls today a transitional period where no one truly has scalability figured out. There is no single right answer for evaluating a scalable platform. But he suggests that virtualization and the cloud make it feasible/affordable to rescale by powers of ten rather than multiples of two. That's exciting to me.

  Scott says this:

  This is uncharted territory. What we do know is that businesses can no longer afford to develop solutions around the edges of the core problem. They can’t just point to the symbols for their systems’ various ills (latency, load imbalance) and invest in the symbols that represent their solutions (scalability, the cloud, CMS platforms, social network platforms) as tools for postponing the inevitable rethinking of their business models. Throwing your business model at the cloud doesn’t make the symptoms go away; indeed, it magnifies them. Symbols aren’t solutions.

  A quote by Sean Leach in this article matches the philosophy of our CTO, Roger Campbell. Namely, get the app into the customers hands quickly and if you need to fix a scale issue, then that's a good problem to worry about when it arrives. Over 90% of web apps never get much traffic anyway, so why waste time until you know it will be an issue? Wasting months upfront analyzing and planning the best scalable architecture could very well translate to you launching nothing...ever.

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x