PerfBytes

When you email us a question or suggestion to our email ask@perfbytes.com , this is what happens. Sandeep clearly listened to all the episodes so far in the history of PerfBytes and pointed out that we hadn't covered Web Services performance testing specifically. He was right. So Sandeep, this episode is for YOU!

Survived the holiday mayhem? How about some official mayhem from the evildoers at Allstate? In this epside of NOTD we'll start examining the simple web performance deficiencies that may have led to the site outages. We welcome Allstate, New York City, PJ Harvey, Michael Buble and Glitterbombing to the News of The Damned!

What better way to renew your faith in performance testing than to review a short list of the few simple things to keep in mind for your engineering efforts. "If your mistake causes such a massive outage that it harms innocent people...most likely you've actually committed a performance deadly sin, of some sort." In this episode, HoCho joins the show as we also list the Ten Holy Performance Comman...

Thank you to our sponsors and listeners for making 2014 our best PerfBytian year yet! Now becoming a tradition for the third year in a row, James and Mark review the best, worst and most hilarious experiences of this 2014 year of performance. We're checking in with Prancercize.com, mentioning the website that shall not be named and nominating a nude actor to the be the PerfBytes Person of The Year...

Despite their attempt to expand Black Friday and Cyber Monday into an entire week-long shopping boondoggle in 2014 there were a few online retailers who still toppled under heavy load, increased mobile traffic and infrastructure vulnerability. James and Mark suggest a few steps to take in your post-holiday review, what kinds of traffic to examine, what kinds of tools to consider and how to prepare...

A few great outages to delight our friends in the underworld including Big Billion day in Bangalore, celebrity weddings and baby announcements, shoes from the future and not all comments about legal discrimination in China are being treated equally. Satan delights at yet another round of punishment and suffering at the hands of IT evildoers.

Do know about all that stuff running overnight, all night long, that sometimes fails in the middle of the night? And then it completely ruins your day when your boss comes to your desk and asks: "Did you ever test that settlement reports job?" Ooops! On this episode of PerfBytes we'll answer an email from ask@perfbytes.com with tips on testing and optimizing batch job performance. Episode formally...

This holiday season is going to be filled with gadgets - lots of little whiz-bang, awesomely cool, mini-computing, battery-powered doo-hickeys that will promise to make your lives easier through the miracle of mobile micro-computing platforms. Unless of course, the guys who make those gadget apps didn't think about testing performance before they pushed into production. In this episode James and M...

It’s Apple, Motorola, Canadians, Dehli Housing Authority, naked famous actors and free lasagna on this global episode of News of The Damned from back in September of 2014. There’s no endless free bread sticks when there’s crashes with streaming systems, ticket systems, content distribution systems and overloaded databases. That guy is still screaming as the website keeps spinning. Bwaaahhaaahaahaa...

Posthumous posting from earlier this year, James and Mark cover a small suite of satanic shame in this episode of PerfBytes' News of The Damned. Airlines, passengers and raw materials used to make air planes are all melting down at the same time - at least the planes themselves are staying in the air. We see innocent charities hammered by kindness and still Vincent Price keeps laughing as websites...

It's time for PerfBytes Live at the STPCON conference in Denver, Colorado! In the unseasonably warm November 2014 this is a recording of the live broadcast of the PerfBytes podcast with your abstractly random hosts Mark Tomlinson, James Pulley and guest host Howard Chorney covering the conference hot topics such as continuous continuousness, performance puzzlers, Denver police swat teams and PRONQ...

After a short summer vacation, your trusted source of performance testing advice, wisdom and humor returns as James and Mark chat about industry standardization and certification, holiday SWAT teams, uncomfortable Kevlar, sacred performance undergarments and microbial shrimp. Welcome Back to PerfBytes!

Hazed and Confused is now the official ice cream for all performance testers and engineers, courtesy of our guest Robert Wescott, who is the author of the recent "Every Computer Performance" book. James and I had a great time speaking with Bob about his experiences in writing the book, translating his expertise into written form and contributing so much to the continued learning that every perform...

Part 3 of the 2014 July 4th PerfBytes BBQ - now we get a little weird...

The second hour of the PerfBytes Live BBQ, we are talking about the introduction of the Performance Manifesto.

It's the 4th of July, so it must be time for PerfBytes Annual meetup and live show broadcasting!

Websites are crashing in the UK, it must be time for News of The Damned. Special guest Seth Eliot joins us for a chat about Zen and The Art of Website Crashing, the spoils of craft brew contaminating the water supply in Portlandia and repeat offender India School Certificate Exam site melts-down again. Vincent Price keeps laughing and websites keep crashing!

Rebuffering, rebuffering, rebuffering...but it's not a surprise that yet another system has crashed in the UK, this time by Sky's not-streaming-enough servers. Cheap airfare, Ricky Gervais, cute dogs, and we welcome Sweden's own Toontrack to their country's first-ever nomination to the NOTD, failing under the load of an anticipated product launch. That guys keeps screaming...still screaming, while...

Answer me this: how many, how much, averages, standard deviations, frequency distribution or just plain yes or no? It's very hard to know whether your testing effort truly has worth if you don't take a few steps into a few scientific techniques for data analysis. Seth Eliot joins us for a conversation about Data Driven Performance as we learn about the science behind application data, metrics and...

You journey through a land of both shadow and substance and you can see the curve on the CPU graph is totally going in the wrong direction - a little worse every minute, every user and soon enough the system will just tip completely over. But how can you test for those conditions beyond the capacity of your test lab environment? You gotta estimate future performance based on the results you gather...

PerfBytes frequent listener and long-time performance guru Richard Bishop gives this special report on the recent outages in Great Britain, which is not having such great luck at keeping public-facing websites up-and-running.

It’s time for PerfBytes News of The Damned for May 5th, 2014. Satan once again kicks of a round of impressive stories of website and system crashes from around the world. We pay credit to a drunken ticket sales site, Ted Nugent, Hello Kitty, miraculous tandem web server configurations, and Man United - all of whom have the unfortunate luck, or lack thereof, to be joining us this week! And we learn...

As the spring time flowers blossom and warm sunlight shines upon the meadow, somewhere there's a junior developer struggling to fix a scalability defect in production with not one frickin' clue about how they ended up in that messy predicament. In this riveting episode of PerfBytes we chat about how some organizations end up doing all their performance work in development: as an environment, a pha...

It's time for PerfBytes LIVE! Please join us again at STPCON in April 2014 for a live broadcast recording of the PerfBytes podcast featuring your wildly banal hosts Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley. We are celebrating the one year anniversary of the PerfBytes Live STPCON broadcasting and will include our coverage of the STPCON news, the performance year in review, the News of The Damned, industry h...

There are even more ticket sales websites crashing in the UK, so it must be time for PerfBytes News of the Damned. In this episode for March 24th, 2014 we talk about Kate Bush’s rockin’ concert dates at the Apollo theater after thirty-five years, a roving underwater shark named Lydia, crowd-sourced searchers for flight Malaysian flight 370, and so many followers of Soul Cycle are disrupted in thei...