The post Performance Testing Interview with Phillip Odom appeared first on LoadStorm.

Phillip Odom’s background is in Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering. Phillip grew up in Nashville, TN in the late 1970’s and 1980’s with access to “home computers” like the Tandy TRS-80, the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the Amiga, etc. So his childhood was spent making these quirky and somewhat crude machines do things, sometimes anything.

When and why did you get into this industry?

Professionally I have been working in technology for almost 20 years. I spent the first ten years working in the hardware and IT services sectors (Integration/Product Development/R&D) almost exclusively focused on the healthcare vertical. In 2004 I chose to take my career in a different direction. My friend Scott Moore, ran the QA/Performance practice for Deloitte in Nashville. He told me that he was leaving and planned to start a new company focused something that I was only vaguely familiar with called load testing. He sold me on the idea, took me under his wing, and I joined the startup team at LoadTester, Inc. in 2004.

There I began to learn how to perform (Mercury) Loadrunner consulting, and the finer points of the exquisite art of performance testing. I had opportunities to test web apps, SAP, Citrix, Oracle, custom .NET and J2EE portals, WebLogic, and all sorts of application technologies in between. Eventually (at the beginning of 2007) I started my own Application Performance Management (APM) practice called AppDiagnostics, where we performed integration and implementation services for Borland, CA, HP, OPNET, Microsoft, and SOASTA testing and diagnostic products. In September of 2013, AppDiagnostics was acquired by another firm, and I elected to join LoadStorm in November.

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

I would consider myself a QA professional, for sure. I am more in tune with process development and execution. I generally can script with ANSI C and VB Script. I can build web objects with HTML and JQuery/JavaScript. I have even dabbled with Java for the purposes of Arduino prototyping, but code definitely does NOT drip from my fingertips.

What is your specialty? Why?

My specialty is process and service development. I generally subscribe to the notion: Show me the “why”, and I will show you the “what and how”. I enjoy the challenge of solving problems with repeatable processes.

Is there anything commonly overlooked in web application testing?

The number one mistake in Performance Testing is NOT proactively testing your application. All too often, people only consider performance testing AFTER a problem occurs. Then, they usually want to throw more hardware at the problem.

How much involvement do you have with load and performance testing?

I have been an active practitioner of performance for the last nine years. Generally I am involved with almost all aspects of performance testing, including: initial project scoping, project management, requirements gathering, objective setting, test planning, business process design, test script development, test product configuration, test execution, analysis, reporting, and final documentation. Once, (no kidding) I even had a client ask me to make guacamole… And I did.

What would you say is the difference between load testing and performance testing?

Well, first I see Load Testing and Stress Testing as sub-sets of Performance Testing. Beyond that, I was taught and currently teach my clients that there are distinct differences between a Stress Test and a Load Test.

The objective of a Stress Test is to achieve “First Point of Failure”. The objective of a Load Test is to achieve a simulation of a “Peak Hour” of “Real-World” usage.

Who are the top 3 testing experts that you know?

I know way more than three, but the most significant to me would be Scott Moore the Founder and President at Northway Solutions Group.

Do you feel like performance testing is an accepted critical part of the development life cycle?

No, but things are getting better. In the ideal world, we all want every customer to “engineer” performance into the SDLC. Many times, this still doesn’t happen. For example, my wife is a software developer for a publicly traded, Fortune 500 health care company with 50,000 employees. While they have implemented formal QA from a functional perspective, they STILL do not performance test anything. ANYTHING, EVER! When her team experiences a performance issue, their first reaction is to throw more hardware or bandwidth at the problem. This usually ends with costing more money only to achieve mixed results.

I am under the impression that some customers still equate performance testing to some form of Voodoo/Black Magic that they don’t understand, never realizing the rigorous processes behind most performance delivery frameworks. To that end, I have written testing methodology documents in excess of a couple hundred pages bemoaning the principals and benefits of repeatable processes. However, I have never sacrificed a chicken to improve transactions per second.

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The post Graphic Demise: Blogger Down appeared first on LoadStorm.

The post Graphic Demise: Blogger Down appeared first on LoadStorm.

The post An Honor to Share Our Web Performance Tuning Article appeared first on LoadStorm.

Usually when I receive an email that starts out like the sentence above, I figure that I’m about to be solicited for something to which my wife would strongly object. Then upon further reading, I realized this email was legit and became intrigued at the request.

“I found your article extremely interesting and would like to spread the word for people from Ex Yugoslavia.”

That was very cool. Everyone enjoys hearing that their writing is valuable to someone – even better if they want to pass it on to their friends!

Jovana found value in our post about web performance tuning. Yeah, one of my favorite topics too.

It is an honor to be asked if someone may translate your article to another language…in this case Serbo-Croatian language.

According to Jovana, “My purpose is to help people from Ex-Yugoslavia better understand some very useful information about computer science.” That is quite a compliment to me (at least that’s my perspective), and it does my heart good to know that other computer scientists around the world could benefit from something I contributed. Me? Scott Price, the balding geeky guy that lives in a remote mountain location is helping computer science? Sounds great, albeit unlikely.

Some quick info about Jovana Milutinovich:

I was born in Yugoslavia, Europe. Former Yugoslavia consisted of now totally independent states like Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia & Hercezovina, Slovenia and Macedonia, which are all united by Serbo-Croatian language. I’m currently studying Computer Science at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Thanks Jovana for considering our thoughts worthy of sharing with your colleagues. We appreciate your professionalism in asking for permission, and we consider it an honor that you read LoadStorm’s blog. I sincerely hope you are successful in your computer science career. We look forward to hearing more about your contributions to our industry. Please stay in touch.

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The post LoadStorm at DrupalCorn Camp 2012 appeared first on LoadStorm.

The DrupalCorn Camp 2012 will be held on the Iowa State University campus in Ames on August 3-4, 2012 for open source enthusiasts, Drupal designers, hackers, Drupal developers, UI experts, IT managers, and web performance geeks like us.

We here at LoadStorm are Drupal fans because this site is built on it. We have worked with Drupal for many sites, and it is a great open source app for publishing content.

The highlight of this world-class event is Thunder and Lightning: LoadStorm and Other Ways to Stress Out Your Drupal Site by Andy Kucharski, who is considered to be one of the best Drupal developers in the world. His company of Drupal experts are highly recommended in the open source community. Our customers have worked with them to improve the performance of project built upon Drupal’s code. There are so many configuration settings and Drupal app intricacies that affect performance that it usually pays big dividends to Andy and his team involved.

Apparently, he likes LoadStorm as a load testing tool. We are honored to be associated with such a skilled open source geek, and we wish to support Andy in his presentation. Please register for the event if you can be in Ames Friday and Saturday.

There are a great group of sponsors too. Thought I should mention that and link to them since they are footing the bill.

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The post LoadStorm is a Registered Trademark appeared first on LoadStorm.

It’s official: LoadStorm® is a registered trademark of the United States Patent and Trademark Office! We filed for the trademark four years ago…the wheels of government turn slowly. It took a letter from our attorneys to force the issue because they had put us on hold for a couple years. Apparently, they were hung up on a communication product called “Storm”.

But now all is well. We have our trade name and no one else can steal it. Whew!

Thanks to all the users of our load testing tool that have made LoadStorm® a global success in a few short years. We appreciate every one of our customers.

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The post Storm Hits Amazon & Affects LoadStorm appeared first on LoadStorm.

However, the US-East-1 region (Virginia data center) for AWS got hit by a storm (not LoadStorm) last night. They lost power for about 30 minutes which caused extended outage for our load testing tool as well as other well-known services includng Netflix, Heroku, Pinterest, and Instagram.

It is frustrating to us to experience any downtime, but I guess we are in good company. The data center outage was the result a powerful electrical storm struck the Washington, D.C. area, leaving as many as 1.5 million residents without power.

Where was the generator power?

Apparently it didn’t work correctly to prevent the servers from going without power. Hmmm….sounds like the engineering was inadequate. I know that type of equipment is expensive, but we are talking about one of the largest and most advanced data centers on the planet. There is no excuse. In the words of James T. Kirk in his scrap with Khan, “We got caught with our britches down.” Maybe the AWS engineers need to take the Kobayashi Maru test.

What’s worse is that customers were affected for more than 30 minutes as Amazon worked to recover virtual machine instances. “We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area,” Amazon reported at 8:30 pm Pacific time. Shortly after that message they said “power has been restored to the impacted Availability Zone and we are working to bring impacted instances and volumes back online.”

It took several hours to fully recover the EC2 server instances and the EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes. A number of big web applications and popular services were down for much longer. Although LoadStorm was back up by about 8:00 am MDT, Instagram was unavailable until about Noon Pacific time Saturday, more than 15 hours after the incident began. Heroku reported 8 hours of downtime for some services, and ironically, Heroku is a cloud infrastructure provider that uses AWS data centers.

Let’s not do this again please

We will be exploring ways to prevent this outage in the future. LoadStorm utilizes several data centers in the EC2 cloud, but we had some critical dependencies on Virginia for core processing. Again, we weren’t alone because this outage affected Netflix, which is famous for spreading its resources across multiple AWS availability zones. We do too, and the strategy should allow both Netflix and LoadStorm to route around problems at a single data center. LoadStorm and Netflix have remained online through past AWS outages affecting a single availability zone, but this one got us all.

We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers. We will have a team meeting on Monday to seek engineering changes that will allow us to avoid this type of problem in the future.

Thanks for using LoadStorm as your cloud load testing tool.

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The post Why Performance Testing Is Important – Perspective of a Guest Blogger appeared first on LoadStorm.

Performance testing encompasses a range of different tests which enable analysis of various aspects of the system. One of the simplest ways to test the performance of a website is through load testing. This provides information about the behaviour of the system when handling specific loads of users, who might be providing a number of transactions simultaneously on the same application.

The role of load testing in business

Load testing can monitor the system’s response times for each of the transactions during a set period of time. This type of monitoring can provide a lot of useful information, especially for business managers and stakeholders, who look for conclusions based on these results, along with any data to support these findings. Load testing can also raise attention to any problems in the application software and fix these bottlenecks before they become more problematic.

As with any test in performance testing, the results depend on the application under test. The main reason for carrying out such testing is to measure and report the behaviour of the website under an anticipated live load. As a result of testing, end user response times can be reported, as can key business processes, CPU and memory statistics. Importantly, it allows site owners to see how a planned release performs compared to a website system which is currently live.

These results can of course be affected by other factors outside of the system’s control such as the users’ broadband speeds. As with any application under test, every application will differ a little between the simulation of users and the live number of users when it comes to performance testing.

Different kinds of performance testing

Other areas which performance testing can monitor are stress testing, which deals with the upper limits of capacity within the system which determines how well the web application will perform if there is a sudden surge of demand and the current number of users goes above and beyond the maximum levels supported.

Endurance testing also monitors the system’s continuous load. For example, potential leaks can be detected in memory utilization, along with analysis of performance degradation and how the system copes under sustained use.

Other types of performance testing include spike testing, which involves a sudden increase in the load of users, to see how the system behaves and responds to a dramatic ‘spike’ in users. Meanwhile, configuration testing can look at configuration changes to any components of the system in terms of performance and behaviour. In some cases, isolation testing may be required to repeat a test execution and to reconstruct where a system problem lies.

All of these are methods of performance testing which can demonstrate that a system is meeting performance criteria. They can also analyse and compare the results of two systems and even measure which aspects of the system can be improved by discovering what causes it to overload.

Testing a future performance

As technology has advanced, performance testing has become increasingly more difficult to determine. This is in part due to the complexity of modern web browsers and advances such as HTML 5. These new web browsers have various complex features, for example websockets, which mean that messages are becoming more event-driven by user actions.

In the future, HTML clients are undoubtedly going to become more sophisticated, almost like full apps themselves. This will mean that simulated performance behaviour is more difficult and harder to mimic, making it more complicated to understand than the actual system.

The advantage that a performance testing system such as LoadStorm has in this aspect, both now and in the future is that it has a sustainable scripting solution which will be able to overcome a number of issues. While performance testing can sound daunting, its results mean that it’s a process well worth undertaking.

The purpose of performance testing provides its investors a high level of confidence in a web application’s ability to handle large volumes and patterns of traffic prior to going live. This is because testing a site’s web performance is an important part of the web design and optimisation process, an integral cog in uniting both the business and the consumer.

The post Why Performance Testing Is Important – Perspective of a Guest Blogger appeared first on LoadStorm.

The post Programmer’s Memory Lane appeared first on LoadStorm.

Several of the historical computers look familiar. They take me back to the days when hardware was expensive, underpowered, and we had to conserve every byte of memory. Yeah, memory and disk was measured in kilobytes. Remember tape drives? I do. Card punch? Those were NOT the good old days.

Today, LoadStorm is coded mostly in Java. The UI is currently built in Ruby on Rails, but we are writing the next release of our UI in Java and using Google Web Toolkit. The result should be a much more elegant and functional Rich Internet Application.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will notice that Java is the most popular language on the planet today. It’s surprising to me that C is still so popular.

As an old programmer, I have to admit that I’ve coded in most of these languages. Fortran in college was updated to F77. COBOL ran all the financial processing at First Illinois Bank. BASIC to write crappy math problems in high school. C at General Motors for robotic simulation. Pascal was a requirement by my professors for all complex course assignments like writing B-trees. C++ as an understudy to Roger Campbell. PHP for Drupal. And the worst part? I am not (or wasn’t) very good at any of them.

Sorry for waxing nostalgic.

A big thanks to Rackspace for the infographic.

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The post Cloud Computing is Green appeared first on LoadStorm.

So storm your website from the cloud right now. Sign up for a free LoadStorm account and try it out.

The post Cloud Computing is Green appeared first on LoadStorm.

The post Web Performance Browdown – Anthony Davis appeared first on LoadStorm.

Please indulge me with a little diversion from our normal deeply technical tips & tricks to bring you a funny picture. To set the stage for why this appeals to me, I was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. That makes me a University of Kentucky Wildcat basketball fan by heritage. It’s in my blood. I cannot help being a fanatic any more than Yoda could take credit for his big pointy ears. It is a given in this universe.

This special Google search image is a tribute to this year’s college basketball player of the year: Anthony Davis. He is a Wildcat. His performance on the court is extraordinary. He is already the consensus #1 pick in the next NBA draft.

If he was a web application, he would have sub-second average response time with over 1 million concurrent users. If he was a Constitution-class Federation starship, he would have a top speed of warp 23. If he was on the cast of Big Bang Theory, he would be Sheldon’s more intelligent younger brother who leaves in multiple parallel universes simultaneously. If he was an Android app, iPhone would shutdown manufacturing immediately and leave thousands of children around the world unemployed. If he was a survivor on Battlestar Galactica, the fleet would have found Earth in a week. If he was president of a third-world country, the Justice League of America would move it’s headquarters to his country faster than you can say “invisible plane”.

Here is a young man with amazing humility and impeccable teamwork, so what do people use as his defining characteristic? His eyebrows. Or more accurately, his eyebrow. Earning a nickname from announcers and bloggers – “The Brow” – which is not used in derision, but with admiration. It has gone so far that kids make signs for ESPN SportCenter saying things like “Florida is gonna get Browdown”. It’s insane. Funny, but insane. Perhaps I just have a twisted sense of humor. Google jumped on that bandwagon because it was a powerful energy surge in the universe, but they are premature in calling the Cats this year’s champions. That won’t happen for another 6 weeks!

To Anthony: You are a hero to geeks like me. May you have a long and illustrious career in the NBA, make lots of money, and stay humble. Listen to Jamal Mashburn about what to do with your investments. And….please get a pair of tweezers.

Anthony is to basketball what LoadStorm is to load testing tools.

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