Archive for the ‘General’ Category

New look

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

If you've been to this site before, you may have noticed the new look. For various reasons, I've converted the site from drupal to Wordpress. Everything seems to be working, and hopefully most of the old links will redirect to their new locations. One thing that is no longer ...

When can I start performance tuning? How do I monitor ____?

Friday, November 16th, 2007

It seems (at least to me) that often the first thing a performance engineer, especially an inexperienced one, wants to do is start tuning the application- change settings, configurations, etc. to make it go faster. Who doesn't want to be the "superstar" that saved the company by enabling some ...

Bottlenecks: Part 2 of 4

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

This is the second in a four part series about finding bottlenecks in an application or system. Memory Bottlenecks A memory bottleneck is a condition where a lack of memory (or general limitation of memory access) slows the performance or scalability of the application. I will discuss how to detect two ...

Building Performance Testing Teams

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Introduction There have been many books, articles and web sites dedicated to various aspects of performance testing: how to use load testing tools, how to create automated scripts, how to monitor servers, etc. etc. What I haven't seen, is any discussion about how to create a performance testing team: what ...

STPCon 2007: Day Three

Friday, October 5th, 2007

9:00 am - 10:00 am: Applying SPE to Java EE Application Design, Development and Deployment William Louth If I can try to summarize SPE (Software Performance Engineering) in a single sentence, it is the practice of characterizing application use cases and creating models that can have many uses, including problem diagnosis, and ...

STPCon 2007: Day Two

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

8:45 am - 9:45 am: Keynote: Performance Testing: It isn't what you might think Scott Barber Ed Correia gave a somewhat awkward introduction (ask someone else who was there) of conference keynote speaker Scott Barber. Barber spoke for approximately a half hour about myths and realities of performance testing. He ...

STPCon 2007: Day One

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Today was the first day of the three day Software Test & Performance Conference, held in Boston, MA (well, Cambridge, actually). On schedule for Day 1 are several full-day tutorials. I sat in on Scott Barber's "Performance Testing Secrets in Context." This class covered the material in the recent ...

Welcome to PerformanceEngineer.com

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Welcome to PerformanceEngineer.com! Here you'll find a plethora of information and links about software performance and performance testing: articles in several Topics links to performance related News from around the Web a Forum to ask questions and exchange ideas a Glossary of performance testing terms Links to other performance related web sites Registered users see ...

Using open source tools for performance testing

Friday, September 7th, 2007

This video has been around for about a year, but I just came across it. It is pretty interesting and worth watching. For experienced performance engineers, there isn't a lot of new territory covered, but some interesting comments on tools and processes used at Google. If you don't ...

LR2JM - Convert LoadRunner Scripts to JMeter

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

UPDATED 4/24/08: Moved script to Google Code LR2JM LR2JM (LoadRunner to JMeter) is a perl script (lr2jm.pl) used to convert a LoadRunner script created using VUgen into a format usable by Apache JMeter, an open source performance and load testing tool. The script is alpha quality at this point. There is support ...

Diagnosing Garbage Collection Performance Problems

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc5.0/gc_tuning_5.html http://blogs.sun.com/jonthecollector/

Using Apache mod_deflate on Solaris10

Friday, June 8th, 2007

One of the easiest ways to quickly improve your web site's perceived performance is to use compression to decrease the size of the data transfer. Especially with increased use of javascript and css that comes with "web 2.0-ification ", using data compression is pretty much a no-brainer if you ...

Bottlenecks: Part 1 of 4

Saturday, March 24th, 2007

This is the first in a four part series about finding bottlenecks in an application or system. Finding Bottlenecks Finding bottlenecks in a system is one of the primary tasks that a performance engineer or tester performs and, I would argue, one of the most important. Yet is seems ...

What is Software Performance?

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

How do I achieve good performance? By performance testing, of course!  That's the short answer.  In reality, what makes a web site perform well is largely good design, followed by good testing.  By my estimate, 80% of a site's performance will come from good design and best practices, while 15% will ...