PerformanceEngineer.com » General

Performance Engineering Podcast

charlie — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:42:50 +0000

Software Engineering Radio has a podcast on Performance Engineering. In this episode Martin talks with Chris Grindstaff about the fundamentals of performance engineering. The episode discusses when and how to work on performance of client- and server-side systems, what you should take into account during development to avoid performance issues, typical situations that cause [...]

New look

charlie — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:59:08 +0000

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 here are the forums. [...]

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

charlie — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:02:06 +0000

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 feature or setting that improved capacity or performance by 200%? I have even seen occasions where testers sit down to do a performance test plan and practically the first thing they do is start with identifying all of the "tunables" for every part of the application. Too often I hear questions after running a load test that begin with, "What if we change..."

Bottlenecks: Part 2 of 4

charlie — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:12:50 +0000

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 common scenarios of memory bottlenecks, there are certainly more possibilities depending on your application and platform.

Building Performance Testing Teams

charlie — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:31:04 +0000

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 processes to use, what works in a team context and what doesn't. In this article, I will discuss some of the issues I have faced in building performance testing teams.

STPCon 2007: Day Three

charlie — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:43:29 +0000

9:00 am - 10:00 am: Applying SPE to Java EE Application Design, Development and Deployment William Louth

STPCon 2007: Day Two

charlie — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:53:55 +0000

8:45 am - 9:45 am: Keynote: Performance Testing: It isn't what you might think Scott Barber

STPCon 2007: Day One

charlie — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:06:28 +0000

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 book (currently available only in electronic form) Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, of which Scott Barber was a contributing author.

Welcome to PerformanceEngineer.com

charlie — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:44:23 +0000

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 fewer ads, can post comments and download a script to convert LoadRunner to JMeter Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy the site!

Using open source tools for performance testing

charlie — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:19:41 +0000

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 have the time (1 hour) to watch the whole thing, the folks over at myloadtest.com did a good job on a write-up and summary of the video, so I won't provide one here.

LR2JM – Convert LoadRunner Scripts to JMeter

charlie — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:09:13 +0000

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.

Diagnosing Garbage Collection Performance Problems

charlie — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:06:16 +0000

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

Using Apache mod_deflate on Solaris10

charlie — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 04:07:14 +0000

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 have the CPU overhead. Several years ago, the use of compression on the web server was lot more complicated, since not all browsers supported the gzip or deflate content-encoding type. Nowadays, you'd have a hard time finding a browser that doesn't support it.

The good news is Apache web server comes with an easy to configure compression called mod_deflate. The bad news is that it almost never is compiled as a module by default and on Solaris 10 (which comes with Apache web server pre-installed, by the way), it can be a little tricky getting it to work.

Bottlenecks: Part 1 of 4

charlie — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 02:06:03 +0000

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 that few know the basics of bottlenecks and how to idenity them. Did you know that there are really only 4 different areas where you find nearly all bottlenecks?

What is Software Performance?

charlie — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:00:00 +0000