PerfBytes

Did you know you were hammering the database 1.5 million times per page load? Our friend Petar Puskarich joins us again for this second half of a great discussion about performance diagnostics. We chat about using diagnostics in production specifically with middleware and ops teams, automated deployment of diagnostics configuration, continuous diagnostics and other tips for circumnavigating the po...

Needle. Haystack. Go! Sometimes all we get from our load testing tools is a capture of the response times and throughput, and maybe some minimal resource monitoring if you're lucky. That means to actually see deeply into the application code as it is running, a diagnostics package can open that black-box to you, to find out exactly WHY the system is running slow. As you dig into the system under t...

It’s time for PerfBytes News of the Damned for March 4th, 2014, with our special founding father Carlos Chidiac. Websites are a crashin' like crazy around the world and special applause to the IT folks in the UK who are leading the pack in 2014 with outages! Fanatical figure skating fans, donut-luvin' brits and the on-premise melt-down at Marks & Spencer all join us this week. Bwaaahhaaahaahaaaaaa...

Automate. Rinse. Repeat. Every day at every hour and every minute there are developers writing code, committing code to the repo, building snapshots, checking out stuff, debugging it, profiling it and generally making things happen continuously. So, why not have performance testing be part of that continuous world? It’s a hot topic in this edition of PerfBytes where we are joined by our fellow pan...

At some point after working in the same jobs for twenty years, you start to see a trend in the tools that you use every day. They have similar weaknesses, or similar features for sure, but one thing that you might not spend time considering is the gaps in those tools' capabilities. What if you were calling the shots for the future design and functionality for your favorite performance tool? In thi...

It’s time for PerfBytes News of the Damned for February 18th, 2014 - this is the birthday edition edition of PerfBytes where basically we just make fun of the crashing online ticket websites in the UK, the Veterans Administration and some more high school students flood a website trying to get into college sports. Hats off again to the folks in the IT department giving Satan some true competition...

Being a performance tester is a lonely life. Stranded in the data center, working long nights in the freezing cold without anyone to talk to but the little running icon man in the LoadRunner Controller. But wait, you could start a Performance Center of Excellence! That way you could join forces with other performance testers and engineers at your company and then you’ll be part of a team. And you...

It’s time for PerfBytes News of the Damned for February 7th, 2014 - this is the 2014 Super Bowl edition of PerfBytes. Some project managers from the big names in advertising are probably looking for new jobs this month after outages at Maserati, Kia and Esurance. And not to be outdone, information security mayhem sends a bunch of Germans scrambling to crash a website with a name that James can’t p...

It'll be hard to forget this globally diverse episode covering fantastic outages from Canada, China and the UK. PerfBytes News of the Damned, where Satan heaps a heartfelt congratulations to those in the IT department who have been highlighted in the news recently for exemplary end-user punishment, website outage and system failure.

“You put your left boundary in, you put your left boundary out. You do the hokey pokey and you turn the script about.” Dynamic data correlations. (“...that’s what it’s all about”). In this episode of PerfBytes we cover the most technically complex and challenging part of load test scripting. James and I scratch the surface on this topic of transport level traffic analysis and automated scripting p...

Welcome to the first PerfBytes News of the Damned independent podcast segment for January 1st, 2014. As usual, our introduction from Satan heaps a heartfelt congratulations to those in the IT department who have been highlighted in the news recently for exemplary website outage and system failures. In this episode both Myer and the Bill Nye join the News of the Damned.

”Don’t look at me, boss - it’s a problem with the tool.” In particular it’s probably an incompatibility or extreme complexity with a sophisticated performance testing tool that leads you to just throw our hands in the air and point the finger at the vendor or the technology. In this episode we’ll talk about the pitfalls of such behavior, the legitimate and not-so-legitimate arguments of tool blasp...

Happy New Year PerfBytes listeners, this episode is dedicated to you! In this episode we review all the best items from the last twelve months of PerfBytes shows, including the #1 rated show, the best and weirdest News Of The Damned and a little bit of Prancercizing. We announce the PerfBytes Person of the Year for 2013 and the future changes to the show in 2014. Thank you all for listening and he...

In this second of two episodes our friend and sponsor Tim Koopmans will be joining us again as we cover many of the virtual user scripting tips and tricks that we've learned over the many years of using almost every tool on the planet. This episode will review tips that dig a little deeper into debug logging, parameterizing test data, building scripts by hand and combining multiple protocols in yo...

Here's a suggestion: flip up that blast shield and tell old Obi Wan Kenobi to take a try at scripting up a headless driver to generate transport-layer traffic with data correlation, randomization and parameters that simulates thousands or even millions of calls against the system. It's not so easy even when you use the force, eh old man!? In this first of two episodes Tim Koopmans will be joining...

Back when I grew up in Minnesota we played a game called "Duck, Duck, Gray Duck where one my friends would run around the circle of all us kids and tap us on the head - around and around. It's basically the same way a load balancing algorithm works to enable horizontal scalability of large systems. Except that the load balancer would not randomly tap one of us and say Gray Duck and then go sprinti...

It's different for mobile. The variable resources like network and cpu, the limited space and screen size all force you to get your game on for mobile application performance. In this episode Ophir Prusak from Blazemeter.com joins us to discuss the bits that fly off your application as the rubber of your fat and lazy code hits the hard pavement of the device. James tries to laugh like Vincent Pric...

It's time for PerfBytes LIVE! Please join us again at STPCON in October 2013 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 podcast and this special episode will be broadcast LIVE from the STPCON conference and will include our coverage of the STPCON news, the pe...

Look in the mirror. Do you see someone who loves BBQ more than showering? Do you see someone wearing a wool cap and jacket just to keep warm while working in the datacenter? Can you say the word "No!" to a stakeholder? Do you know how many seconds there are in 1 day? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there's a good chance that you are a performance tester. In this episode we explore t...

Performance left to the end of the project? Only two weeks on the schedule for doing load testing, regardless of the complexity or requirements? No qualified performance engineering talent assigned to the team? Sounds like you need a class called: Performance for Project Managers 101. This episode will cover all the common anti-patterns for performance project planning; scheduling, resources, tool...

What's the one thing in common with both hard drives and pizza? In this episode of PerfBytes we discuss yet another essential physical resource common to computer performance: the disk! Whether it's local hard drives, network attached storage, nfs, SAN array or flash SSD - the disks are a common bottleneck that can leave your application in a lurch; sluggish, slow and lifeless.

He's dead Jim. In the last 2 weeks of August 2013 there have been a nearly unbelievable number of system-wide outages at some of the world's largest internet service providers. Microsoft, Amazon, Google...almost everyone except Twitter found their systems lying face down in the mud recently. Even the NASDAQ and NYSE struggle to keep their shared server running in their "Neutral Zone" putting nearl...

Have you seen my car keys anywhere? The older we get the more we might tend to forget about the exciting topic of performance tuning for memory. We're talking about garbage collection, memory leaks and caching strategies. Special guest Scott Moore from Northway Solutions joins us for this whole episode from his home studio in Nashville, TN. The famous newborn Prince George is already crashing webs...

Continuous Deployment, plus Continuous Release might not quite equal Continuously High-Performing apps! As you might have heard, the developers and the ops guys got together and decided to start sharing tricks and secrets. They even figured out how to start doing each others' jobs! But where does performance fit in this highly-automated new paradigm for application development and release? Do you...

Bellman asked Ford, "Do you know the way to San Jose?" More importantly, do you know how many hops it takes for your packet to get there? In this episode of PerfBytes we'll focus on the infrastructure that allows all the different components of your system to work together: the network. Understanding the essential sources of latency for what makes your network transfer slow, what causes congestion...