Archive for April, 2008

Examples on LoadRunner Regular Expressions

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I'm going to show and explain how to use Regular Expressions in LoadRunner. Introduction: The present article is a summarizing of the LoadRunner Regular Expressions challenge and its results. Also, I added code for RegExp patterns/subpatterns matching. All LoadRunner Regular Expressions functions are shown with examples. ...

Python - RRDTool Utilities (module and scripts for RRDs)

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

I started a project on Google Code to create a set of Python tools to make dealing with Round Robin Databases (RRD) less painful.  Setting up RRD's can be tough if you don't know what you are doing. anyone interested can check it out ...

Multiple Dimensions of Performance Testing

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Almost all experts agree that pre-deployment "waterfall" performance testing (which, with the record/playback method, confused by many as the performance testing itself) is not enough - too little, too late. Actually it is just one very specific way of performance testing - with a full spectrum of other approaches, which ...

Solaris Performance Primer: Introduction

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

This web log will is the start of a small series of Solaris performance monitoring tools. We are going to present freely available tools from Solaris, the Tools CD and the DTrace toolkit.This blog will help the upatient ones who want to solve 90% of the day to day performance ...

Adding dates to vmstat logs

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

One of the problems I have with vmstat is that it doesn't have the option to output timestamps (the way iostat does). As a result, if you have vmstat logs and you don't know exactly when it was run or at what interval it was collecting data, then it makes the ...

Roll Your Own SiteScope, a Simple Alternative

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

In working with SiteScope of late, I’ve found that it doesn’t always collect performance metrics the way I want to. More importantly, it can often turn a simple monitoring activity into a complex disaster. Take monitoring via JMX for example. In SiteScope, it has a rather complicated (and sometimes broken) ...

StickyMinds.com Weekly Column: Peeling the Performance Onion

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Performance tuning is often a frustrating process, especially when you remove one bottleneck after another with little performance improvement. Danny Faught and Rex Black describe the reasons why this happens and how to avoid getting into that situation. They also discuss why you can't work on performance without also dealing ...

Hands-off Load Testing with JMeter and Ant

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Automation expert Paul Duvall highlights in a recent post the value of earlier and continuous integration of load tests throughout the development cycle and presents simple step-by-step techniques to create a scheduled integration build that runs JMeter tests. By Alexander Olaru

Java Memory Leaks

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Finding (and fixing) memory leaks in java can sometimes be a tricky process. I recently had to do some analysis on a leaking application and hit a snag. My game plan was to do the following: Capture heap dumps with jmap Analyze dump with jhat Along the way, I ran into ...

Regular Expressions in LoadRunner

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Dmitry Motevich posted a challenge for getting regular expressions working in LoadRunner. Regular expressions in C isn't pretty, but here it is:

Podcast: "Diving into Capacity Planning"

Friday, April 11th, 2008

A podcast that I did for TeamQuest Corporation, back in December, is now available. It's a somewhat unconventional take on the motivations for doing CaP, based on taking into account the apparently frustrating but otherwise very realistic perspective of management. During the podcast, I refer to the CMG Keynote given ...

Automation for the people: Hands-off load testing

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Load testing is often relegated to late-cycle activities, but it doesn't need to be that way. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall describes how you can discover and fix problems throughout the ...

Testing for performance

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

The third and final article in my SearchSoftwareQuality.com Testing for Performance series posted. The complete series can be found here: Testing for performance, part 1: Assess the problem space Testing for performance, part 2: Build out the test assets Testing for performance, part 3: Provide information