LoadStorm™

Ricardo Sueiras is a self-professed "IT professional and geek" (found that on his blog. His formal title is J2EE Systems Architect at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Canterbury, United Kingdom.

Ricardo has extensive experience with web performance and load testing, and we are grateful he invested his time to share some good thoughts with us about a topic we are excited about.

What is your technical background?

I am a system architect, working in J2EE for around 10 years, with a focus on infrastructure design and architecture.

Do you consider yourself more of a software developer or QA professional?

Neither I guess - I am the guy that has to put all the pieces together, make sure it all works and performs as required. When it doesn't, I figure out why and what needs to be done!

When and why did you get into this industry?

I've been in IT for over 20 years as it has always been a passion - it is hard to think of any other industry to be in for me, and am still as interested and driven as when I started 20 years ago. I think its IT's ability to evolve, change and for new technologies to come along that help keep it fresh and interesting.

What is your specialty? Why?

I tend to specialise in open source and collaboration/social software. I have implemented over a period of years a robust process within our organisation for the adoption of open source tools, platforms and software and am heavily involved in collaboration software, initially with the first wave (cc:Mail/Lotus Notes) and now onto the new wave of social collaboration tools. I am also interested in load testing, and have worked on load testing a number of our internal web infrastructures and applications.

Many CIOs do not embrace cloud computing. They have pressures from stakeholders to make system service levels "five nines", and clouds don't offer those SLAs. The trade-off is between highly redundant and available systems at a high cost to maintain compared to much lower cost without the guarantee of high availability. Cloud server platforms are relatively very inexpensive, but it isn't perfect.

Ok, this comes under the heading of "weird stuff" and it is a stretch to call it load testing. My thinking is that this guy is running a test to see how many Madagascar hissing cockroaches fit into his mouth. I don't think it is stress testing because he isn't trying to exceed the capacity of his mouth. In stress testing, he would be trying to break the system; however, in this instance of the test, he is merely trying to break a record (11) previously set by a guy in Kentucky.

Today we're looking at some server overload circumstances from the sad, to the silly and the very expensive ... and some where the hackers got the blame for something that may well have been the load tester's responsibility!

Website flooded after heavy rains

Anyone know how I can find some cool things that happened in information technology on this day in history? I tried to Google it, but the results are useless. However, I did find out that today is Blog Action Day, which is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.

Today is the 67th birthday of a musician who has been relevant in the mainstream for longer than virtually anyone else in modern music. Paul Simon was big when I was a child and still has a strong following. I remember the tunes of Simon and Garfunkel playing in our house before I even knew any of the entertainers. "I am just a poor boy..." was more than just a song, it was my story.

Performance testing is important. Web developers never want their sites or applications to crash under load. If they do, so what? Not all of the failures below are related to high traffic, but the failures are notable because of their impact on users and the far-reaching ripple effect.

From promising thousands of customers £7 top-of-the-line computers, to nearly causing an 800-plane pile-up, 'inconvenience' doesn't even begin to describe some of the most famous application failures.

A Little Cache Goes a Long Way

Drupal is the target of load testing for this series of articles. If this is your first time reading any of the articles in this series, please review the introduction and summary called Load Testing Drupal for a good context of what we are doing.

Everybody has problems. As web developers, we are trained to find solutions using technology. I submit to you that the most important things (all great lists come in threes) when solving a web problem are:

1. Simpler is better
2. There is always a way
3. Passion overcomes intelligence and skill

Simpler is Better

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?