PerfBytes

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. We have two unusually novel additions to the News of The Damned and as always we give away a pair of PerfBytes shoes to innocent audience members. As supporters of the Software Test Professionals performance testing community, the PerfBytes podcast is powered by creative community-driven contributions and the overwhelming desire to improve performance testing practices across our industry. And pancakes.

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 performance professional desires. James recommends a degree in art history.

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 we he is punished by the website crashing as Vincent Price keeps laughing. James invites you to have a not-damned week!

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 instrumentation and how to leverage an understanding of the real-world in load testing. We chat about hippo's, the international space station, zero gravity, motorcycle maintenance and mucus creation.

This episode is formally sponsored by our friends at www.flood.io.

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 in the lab. Extrapolation might be evil, but not understanding basic scalability concepts is essential to your success in performance testing and engineering.

This episode is formally sponsored by our friends at www.flood.io.