PerformanceEngineer.com software performance engineering & testing

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..."

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.

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.

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

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