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 […]
So we’ve been working on SEO and blogging as much as we can when Michael came across this video called “Blogger Down” and thought I should share it with everyone. If you have any experience in blogging or SEO, then you’ve probably had this conversation at one point or another. That, and there’s just something inherently funny about flappy-headed animation like this. So please enjoy this excellent animation by Ricepirate.
“My name is Jovana.” 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 […]
Most farmers don’t like the idea of their cornfields being hit hard by a storm. However, this is bit different. 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 […]
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 […]
LoadStorm provides the lowest cost load testing tool by efficiently using cloud computing resources. In 2008, we launched our service based on the Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud. It has been very good for us. Rarely have we had any reliability issues. 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 […]
When it comes to understanding and improving a website system, whether it be a personal project, a business venture or otherwise, it’s vital a web application is tested for its responsiveness in terms of its stability, i.e how well it can handle a particular workload. Businesses can also find out a lot about their website system through software performance testing, which can build performance into the design and structure of the system, prior to any coding taking place. Performance testing encompasses a range of different tests which enable analysis of various aspects of the system. One of the simplest ways […]
Below is a fun infographic (scroll down) for us ancient geeks that got our computer science degree before the Web. 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 […]
Thanks to Rackspace’s blog for posting this infographic about the impact of cloud computing on our environment. Better efficiency and organization reduces energy and waste. Cloud is good! So storm your website from the cloud right now. Sign up for a free LoadStorm account and try it out.
Ok, now I just want to get silly for a couple of moments. I know you come to the LoadStorm blog to read insightful, unique articles about load testing and web performance. I get it. You are a geek like me. There is a 93.6% probability that you are a Star Trek fan too. Yep, I’ve got Worf as my ringtone. 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. […]