As we begin a new year, hoping it will be usher in global economic recovery, I would like to share what I can find about the collective forecasting in our industry. In my search, I found several predictions about stress testing the financial systems. Hmmm…interesting, but not helpful. One really cool article on Business Insider showed the predictions of visionaries from 1931 of their view of 80 years in the future. William Ogburn had the best view of our high-tech world: Technological progress, with its exponential law of increase, holds the key to the future. Labor displacement will proceed even […]
We have about 3 feet of new snow here from the storm earlier in the week. It makes for a picturesque Christmas holiday for my family. Today I’m just going to share a summary of 2 performance testing articles that I read this morning, then I’m taking off early to enjoy time with my wife, mom, and daughters. Performance Testing in Agile Framework Dishit D posted an interesting article yesterday on his The Performance Testing Zone blog that outlines six challenges of making performance testing work well in a typical agile development project. From my perspective, I just don’t […]
Today is the birthday of one of the creepiest prognosticators ever. Nostradamus was born in 1503 in France and became a physician and astrologer who dabbled in prophecy. He wrote vague and often cataclysmic predictions that brought him quite a bit of notoriety in his day, and he still spawns History Channel specials about how “amazing” he was. Sorry, I just think that he wrote some brilliant predictions that could apply to anything. If you think that he successfully predicted the World Trade Center attack in September of 2001, then please get out of the load and performance testing industry. […]
Tomorrow is a holiday here, and it puts me in a good mood. Thanksgiving forces me to take some quiet time to ponder how truly blessed I am. So today I’m in an appreciative frame of mind. It also makes me feel somewhat child-like because I remember the smell of huge Thanksgiving dinners with my grandfather’s family. This atmosphere has put me in kid mode. That’s the only way I can explain why I found it so fun to get wrapped up in cool web statistics that I found at StatCounter.com. Am I the last geek on the planet to […]
The team over at OakLeaf posted another summary of some load testing they are doing with LoadStorm. Apparently, their first round concluded that: “These tests were sufficiently promising to warrant instrumenting the project with Windows Azure Diagnostics.” The blog post is entitled, “Adding Trace, Event, Counter and Error Logging to the OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project” written by Roger Jennings. It shows how they set up their test scenarios to take actions such as counting customers, creating new customers, and deleting customers. The test run was for 10 to 25 concurrent users over 10 minutes. Roger shares screen […]
I found an interesting blog post today through a tweet that HootSuite found referencing LoadStorm. It is cool to see someone blogging about using our load testing tool. The writer is Roger Jennings who is a 30-year veteran of the programming and management with current specialties in Windows Azure, .NET and OData Oriented. He is a prolific tech writer and has published over 30 books on Microsoft operating systems (Windows NT and 2000 Server), databases (SQL Server and Access), .NET data access, Web services and InfoPath 2003. Here a couple of pertinent quotes from Roger’s blog post: The first test […]
I bring you a blog post I found today about performance testing and improvement, but first…. On this day in 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays. Like most other tremendous breakthroughs, Rontgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature. X-rays are not useful to increase the performance of your web sites, but it sure would […]
Here are a few good insights about software performance from Robert Read in his eBook entitled, How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary. Robert dedicated the book to his colleagues at Hire.com. My favorite parts are listed here as excerpts and included below in the original context: Performance bottleneck can be an example of counting cows by counting legs and dividing by four instead of counting heads. The purpose of stress testing is to figure out where the wall is, and then figure out how to move the wall further out. If the wall is too […]
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 […]
Today we had a customer push the limits for a high measurement of requests per second in our performance testing tool. Their test hit a peak of nearly 1,800 requests per second! Wow, that pretty good. We are still making some improvements to our our own system bottlenecks in AWS, but our team is obviously making some great progress. Yeah, I know. The irony is not lost on me. Performance tuning on the performance testing tool. Yep, even we need to do it. More so all the time because customers are finding LoadStorm to be a great fit for large […]