PerfBytes

Live from PerfBytes' HQ in Monroe, NC - this is a special 4th of July edition of the show: including round-table discussion, interviews and questions and plenty of interjection from a drunk wookie.

If George Carlin were a DBA he might have said, "A [database] is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff" referring to your application's data. This episode of PerfBytes will review the basics of relational database performance, the core components of a database engine that are critical for good performance and how to avoid a few pitfalls in database design. Oh, you're...

There's this thing between your ears called your brain. We're not joking about this, it's called your brain. If you really want to provide value to your team as a performance engineer, you need to start using your brain. This episode of PerfBytes will help you to understand the basic different types of analysis for performance with a few concrete examples. Mark rants about zombie performance teste...

Whether it's planned or unexpected, a flood of traffic hammering any system can be a real shocker as the bits and pieces come crashing down around the ops team and the CIO stops by your desk "for a little chat" about what the hell just happened!? We hope this episode will give you some simple advice about how to be prepared technically and organizationally to cope with point load when it happens t...

Our good friend and mobile gadget guru John Curtis from Black Falcon Consulting joins PerfBytes for a crazy conversation about mobile performance craziness. We chat about the true impact to your system performance caused by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and what you can do about it. John covers the marketing-simple ABC's for mobile performance and James offers up straight-ahead description of l...

It's time for PerfBytes Live! Please join us at STPCON in April 2013 for a live broadcast recording of the PerfBytes podcast featuring your expertly equipped hosts Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley. This show will include our coverage of the STPCON news, current events, industry headlines, extemporaneous speaking from actual performance testers and live Q&A with the members of the audience. You migh...

It's a lonely life, as a performance tester in an agile shop. Your work is pushed to the end of the iteration and then they shut you in the lab for four days right before the release. Well, it's time to get performance up-and-out of the lab and build it into the sprint. That's right - you can become a fully-integrated part of the SCRUM as a performance engineer, enhancing each user story with your...

Production? You remember that system that has to keep running 24x7x365 to keep your customers happy, and employees productive and keep your organization's revenue stream going? Yeah, that one. Did you ever thing that doing destructive load or stress testing on that live system was a good idea? Whether your an external contractor testing over the internet or an internal testing team with no other p...

There is an old Pete Seeger song that goes like: "Where have all the Performance Gurus gone? Where can they be? (okay, perhaps that's not the exact lyric he wrote, I admit). But when it comes to building a performance team the first thing you've got to master is interviewing prospective performance engineering candidates. What questions to ask? How to structure the interviewing process? And what m...

Performance Tests, Stress Tests, Soak Tests, Spike Tests, Benchmarks and Baselines...lions and tigers and bears, oh my! In this episode of PerfBytes we'll take a closer look into the definitions for the most common types of performance testing because I know that James loves getting the question: "Hey James, what's the difference between Load Testing and Stress Testing?" You can find out more abou...

Hey, who turned out the lights? Turn on a LAMP - that's the popular semi-standard configuration of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP which is employed across thousands of websites out there in the wilds of internet reality. Even major vendors like IBM and HP are behind the support for this nearly-enterprise-ready stack. Well, it would be totally enterprise ready if you can get it to scale and perform r...

It is not safe to drive a car with your eyes closed. It is also not safe to operate expensive, mission-critical computing systems without monitoring the performance. How much CPU did that query use? How much memory is being allocated/de-allocated? How many bytes per second are being sent and received from the browser? Monitoring the resource utilization of your application is an absolutely essenti...

Dude, pull your head out of your cloud. You made the leap into the clouds - running new applications, migrating old ones and all the while trying to figure out how to manage and maintain this new shared and uncontrollable infrastructure's performance. In this episode of PerfBytes we'll spend time discussing the in's and out's of THE CLOUD and what steps you need to take to make good on all that el...

We tuned the databases - for scaling up and scaling out - grids and clouds and no-sql. We tuned the servers - for scaling up and scaling out - farms and clusters and automated deployment. We tuned the network - accelerations and caching and CDNs. What's next? Web Performance Optimization - appealing to developers and designers alike, we are focusing on that last (or maybe first) piece of the puzzl...

On this day annually it is typical to make a resolution to "never drink that much alcohol ever again" in reference to the previous night's celebrations and the current recovery from a hangover. It's also a great time to make a new year's resolution about system performance to avoid the digital-hangover due to a lack of performance testing. This special episode of PerfBytes is dedicated to A New Ye...

"Mommy?...where do Performance SLA's come from?" Most project managers and product owners spend the majority of their time studying the functional requirements for the product or application they are building, focusing on user stories that describe HOW an application should work. They forget two other critical definitions for HOW FAST and HOW MANY. This show will discuss the tips for collecting no...

Look, just because the Matrix was a complete virtual reality (complete with guns and motorcycles and the girl in the red dress), the virtualization fad in our REAL reality isn't quite so sexy. Beneath any gigantic array of virtualized hosts or zones, there are still physical machines and infrastructure supporting your application's performance. Even though I think it's been 5 years since I actuall...

Imagine yourself as a performance tester. It's less than 1 week away from Cyber Monday - and all your efforts have come right down to the wire. You've recommended more servers and memory for production to handle the load. You've recommended changes in the load balancer configuration to keep the traffic flowing smoothly. You sent your top ten list of SQL queries to the DBA's - hopefully they got th...

Episode #2: the PerfBytes show with James Pulley and Mark Tomlinson - we'll be talking about the leading causes of big website crashes and how to prevent disasters before they happen. As always, please call us with questions about your performance testing experiences and challenges. We'll try our best to help you find the answers, or at the very least we'll be entertaining. Original Air Date: 11/6...

This is our first PerfBytes show - call us with questions about performance testing, load testing, stress testing, performance tuning, optimization, performance management, processes and tools. We'll try our best to help you find the answers, or at least we'll be entertaining as we make stuff up. Original Air Date: 10/30/2012