Roger Moore turns 83 today. As an actor, he is best remembered as James Bond in several movies during the 1970s where he always got his man (and his girl). James was an inspiration to all of us hot-blooded boys, and his exploits of saving the free world from evil villains was the epitome of performance.

On to today's performance testing news. Apparently IE9 is faster with HTML 5 than Firefox 3.6. Who knew?! Is this the first time in history that a Microsoft browser is the fastest at anything? Read the article below to find out.

Are you getting ready for the holiday season? Can your website handle the huge influx of traffic your marketing department is about to send your way? Tis the season to be load testing. If you aren't hammering your site and performance tuning it in the next month, it will probably be too late to prevent lost revenue.

Neil Ashizawa has written two articles in one entitled How to Test Your Web Apps to Avoid Website Downtime This Holiday Season with a second part that is called, How to remove testing headaches from holiday shopping season.

My favorite section comes in bullet points #8 and #9 of the second part where he talks about cloud testing and peak testing.

8. When choosing cloud partners, go for vendors with experience in delivering new business models. With shortened timelines, you need suppliers with experience in providing off-premises testing.

9. When performing peak load testing, go with expertise. Peak load testing requires a much higher level of expertise than standard load testing to ensure you obtain the proper results.

Other interesting articles today about performance testing, load testing, stress testing and performance engineering include the following:

Browser Speed, Dissected: Firefox 3.6 Is Not As Slow As You Might Think

We have just completed our second run of 245 benchmarks that puts all current major browser through the paces. This time, we added a new high-end 6-core PC that complements our low-end dual-core netbook. The outcome across four disciplines shows that Firefox 3.6 is outdated in not all cases and is still among the fastest browser when you are simply viewing web pages. IE9, however, is the best performing HTML 5 and Flash browser.

F5 Enhances Replication and Data Migration with WAN Optimization Solutions

Testing between Storage and Virtualization Technologies and F5's WAN Optimization Solutions Demonstrates Compelling Customer Benefits for Data Center to Data Center Replication. F5 today announced performance testing results that demonstrate the value of combining storage, virtualization, and WAN optimization solutions to achieve superior data transfer capabilities. With F5's integrated solutions, including the BIG-IP(R) WAN Optimization Module(TM) product, enterprise customers can more efficiently use existing bandwidth and reduce the costs of replicating data between data centers.