So I sit here in my office on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and I’m trying to find more good blogs on load & performance testing. Lots of sources, but many of them aren’t posting very often. I’m trying to find a steady stream of good content. Dynatrace seems to really have the best and most active web performance blogging posts. Then I came across MSDN blogs. Seemed like a great place to find posts about load testing. Ah…here it is, just what I was looking for: VSTS Load Test Team Blog. Huh? The last post was from September 22?!! How […]
I ran into a Tweet today that said, “Is #loadtesting to know *where* it beaks, not *if*. That’s it does isn’t the issue, that I know where and roughly when is #load #testing”. The tweet caught my eye because of the hash tag for loadtesting. The implication, as I interpreted the 140 character bit of wisdom, is that load testing answers the questions: How much load breaks a system? Where does the system break under load? Very good observation. I re-tweeted and replied. He then wrote a full blog post to explain his thoughts called Tested to Destruction. I like […]
Novell’s site has a great article about load testing describing how The Washington Post Company implemented an identity access management system by Novell. The article posts this as a primary challenge of their project: How to quickly, reliably and easily conduct system load testing for Novell Access Manager 3.x (Hereafter referred to as “NAM”). You might be surprised at their solution, but I think it is very, very cool. In the article, Corbin Links states that load testing is not important – it is critical to access management: Arguably, one of the most crucial tasks of implementing any form of […]
Have you ever had a Krispy Kreme Burger? It’s definitely over the top. Too much of a good thing. If you have read many of my posts about performance tuning, you know that I am a big proponent of caching. “Cache whenever you can” and “RAM trumps disk” are two of my mantras of web performance tuning. So, I wondered…can you over-cache? Apparently you can – in some situations. As I think about how operating systems use memory, it is obviously a resource to be utilized carefully because it is not an inexhaustible supply. Back in the days (1985) we […]
Identity Access Management (IAM) is a very complex aspect of IT. Finding someone that really understands it is a challenge. I have found one of those guys. Corbin Links is an expert in the implementation of various forms of access management systems – commonly called Single Sign On by those of us that need to simplify. He is the author of a trilogy of books entitled “IAM Success Tips Volume 1-3″. Corbin has gotten involved with load testing because many times his projects for large enterprises requires his team to ensure performance of IAM. We at LoadStorm are fortunate in […]
I read a good article this morning that presents a case study of scaling a web site. 6 Ways to Kill Your Servers – Learning How to Scale the Hard Way by Steffen Konerow presents some excellent points about how to avoid system crashes in your web application. Surprisingly, there are not direct mentions of load testing the site re-launch before going live. Load testing is implied throughout, yet never specifically addressed. While not everyone will have these same problems, and each web app is distinct in its architecture, the tuning process Steffen describes is very applicable to almost any […]
On SearchSoftwareQuality, there is a section called Ask the Software Expert where a “guru” answers someone’s question. Scott Barber has a post for Understanding performance, load, and stress testing that I find amusing. The content is nothing that most web developers would find particularly noteworthy, except this pithy conclusion about the underlying myth of load testing and performance testing: Experience tells me that these questions stem from the myth that “performance testing is just functional testing, only with more users.” This simply is not the case. One will not meet with success while performance testing, except by accident — which […]
Gartner reports 13.8% increase in mobile device sales in the second quarter of 2010 over 2009 Q2. Load testers should take note that global access to web sites is becoming more common from smartphones. In fact, smartphone sales are now up 50.5% from the same period in 2009. Access the web from a mobile device gets cheaper and easier all the time. As web developers, we should all be enabling our apps and sites for mobile access. I was surprised to see that Apple only has a 2.7% share of the overall mobile device market. Android also overtook Apple’s iPhone […]
CTOs Don’t Get It One of the most disruptive events at organizations is the disconnect between decisions made by managers and the views of those decisions by employees. Does this situation sound familiar? Your CTO or CIO makes a decision to forego load testing until after the launch of your web application. Your team responds by talking about how the higher ups don’t get it, they don’t understand the issues with system performance, they are making shortsighted decisions, and they are ignoring the product development team. You have seen this before – management is saying “postpone” and they mean “cancel”. […]
I found this interesting because it shows how even large companies running on their own “safe” data centers can experience massive performance failure. SaaS and cloud providers may get media attention for outages, but isn’t it somewhat hypocritical of Fortune 5000 CTOs to claim that their internal systems are “safe”? Come on, let’s be real. Systems have been experiencing poor performance for 60+ years, and hardware will continue to fail, and software will always have bugs, and architects will overlook weaknesses, and CEOs will annually cut budgets for performance engineering. Twitter If you’ve used Twitter much in the past year, […]