From my experience, Flash has been a bigger problem than a benefit in web development. That conclusion is affected greatly by my perspective of someone highly interested in performance. It is now published for the world to see that Steve Jobs agrees with me.
I just read an article that is quite useful on the hackification site. There are a few things that I don’t totally agree with, but this is one of the most practical posts I’ve read on development that isn’t full of bias for one framework/approach/toolset or another.
10 Development Tips in a nutshell are:
Thanks for the replies to my comparison of LoadStorm and LoadRunner pricing. You make valid points. However, I do not see us as arguing because you are essentially agreeing with me. I have never made any negative statement about the quality of LoadRunner. David’s point in the initial tweet was that LoadRunner is powerful, but for most developers the cost and learning curve make the LR solution a non-starter.
Perry Reed has worked in performance testing for eight years, and he has extensive experience with load testing for large software applications. Perry has applied his skills at such companies as Publix Supermarkets and Home Shopping Network.
LoadStorm has been added to the Rails Portfolio of applications that are showcased on a new website. We are the second app to be so honored. BukLuv was the first, and they recommended to the Portfolio guys as a cool Rails app. There have been seven already added to the site this week.
More on RailsPortfolio:
Peter Gfader was born in South Tirol Italy, studied in Austria, and is now working in Sydney Australia as a.NET developer for SSW. His title is Senior Software Architect, ScrumMaster & Scrum Developer Trainer.
Performance engineering has much to do with finding what parts of a system are creating slowdowns or bottlenecks. Load tests are conducted to get the system to produce bad behavior (slow response, errors), and then you can correlate data from within the environment to see what caused the bad behavior.
As a geek, I love cool contraptions that involve cause and effect like dominoes all falling in a beautiful pattern. The breakfast cooking machines created by the Doc in Back to the Future – that kinda stuff.
If you like those types of setups, you will flip over this video:
David Makogon tweeted something interesting a couple of weeks ago. It caught my attention and seemed to be very accurate, so I re-tweeted it. His post was:
“Agreed. LoadRunner is powerful, but steep learning curve+cost. 80/20 rule: do you “really” need it?”
So after I re-tweeted David’s post, I got a response from @mtomlins that said:
“@loadstorm If you need speed, confidence, accuracy, scalability and reliability…then you need #LoadRunner and it’s worth every cent”
That struck me as a haughty reply from someone that must think very highly of their own opinion.
I have no reason to argue with David’s comment about learning curve and cost. It’s no secret that load testers, QA professionals, and performance engineers all over the world know that LR is the most expensive solution available. Wonder why @mtomlins wanted to argue about it?
Here is the thread of Twitter exchanges that ensued (I’m @loadstorm):
loadstorm: @mtomlins so are you saying there is only one solution to get speed, confidence, accuracy, scalability, and reliability in an application?
mtomlins: @loadstorm There are perf testing tools that do a few things very well. I would argue that #LoadRunner does very many things very well.
loadstorm: @mtomlins Agreed it does many things very well. @dmakogon said so. His point was it’s very expensive. What’s cost for one 5,000 user test?
Expensive?…depends on the comparison. 3 years of LoadStorm costs about $35k, which isn’t pocket change for most testers.
loadstorm: @mtomlins How much would 5,000 concurrent users cost for 3 years if I used LoadRunner?
So far I haven’t received an answer from him. Notice how he deflected the question. I was truly curious about this guy at this point. Why would he go out of his way to try to make LoadStorm sound expensive? What motivation would he have to even be so silly as compare LoadStorm vs. LoadRunner on price?! You gotta be kidding me!
There was a time a few years ago that I needed to hire a Senior Performance Engineer consultant to help me set up load generation servers. I also needed help figuring out all the pieces for getting my performance testing environment setup.
Andrew Lombardi is a Java Software Engineer and Head Geek of Mystic Coders, LLC in Santa Ana, California. His blog provides insight into many aspects of technology.
Our thanks to Andrew for taking the time to share some information with us.
Today I read an article by Omer Brandis on IT Toolbox about SAP stress testing versus performance testing. Maybe his perspective differs from mine because he is not focused on web applications. I just haven’t seen other technologists use the definitions and goals of the two types of testing like Omer uses them.
I’m reading the classic book The Art of Software Testing by Glenford Myers. While it may be old (copyright 1979), it is still full of golden nuggets. Myers uses real examples from the ancient days of software development to demonstrate the practical side of testing.
One of my favorites is his definition of stress testing.
“Stress testing is the process of evaluating failure points in a web application by introducing adverse conditions into the runtime environment.”
I thought it would be fun to see how Wikipedia defines some of the key terms we deal with in web application development and testing.
A web developer called me the other day and asked, “Is load testing the same as performance testing?”
I pondered for a moment and replied, “Not really.” Hmmmm…now I needed to support my answer. Thus began a hunt for good answers to my client’s question.
Searching Google, gleaning from our interviews, and asking respected colleagues were parts of my pursuit for the truth about load vs. perf. Sorry to abbreviate, but I’ve heard cool engineers shorten it to “perf”, and I desperately want to be cool. (in a geeky way)
It’s that time of year. Set some new goals. Make some changes that will have 2010 run smoother than last year and accomplish more than ever before.
Two key parts to this post:
- Performance Testing Frequency
- 8 Principles to Succeeding in Your New Year’s Resolution
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
As I sit here on this Monday morning and try to figure out what I should do first, it hits me that today is the beginning of an exciting year. 2009 will probably be remembered by most people as the big global economic recession. For me, 2009 will be significant because of the launch of LoadStorm.
Your website is a little slow – so what? Well, it is probably costing you money. I have been researching published facts about web performance because we are always trying to understand our industry better. This post should help you realize that improving your web application performance can directly impact your bottom line by 10% or more. Don’t believe me? Read on…
I read an article today on the E-commerce Times site Web Performance Metrics That Matter. It was the first result in a Google search on “web performance metrics”, and the title sounded like a perfect hit. My intent was to see what other people think are the best performance metrics.
Here is a paragraph that really surprised me:
The Slashdot effect occurs when a smaller website is flooded with visitors, usually as a result of being linked to from a high profile website. The name comes from the Linux and Open Source blog http://slashdot.org, a site which handles 80 million page views a month. Many home servers or low bandwidth sites that post content interesting to one of these larger blogs have experienced significant downtime when the traffic from Slashdot suddenly migrates to their own servers. Performance engineering for the Slashdot effect is essentially engineering for a worst case scenario – but that worst-case involves more traffic than developers could ever have imagined!