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 about to conduct your first database performance test? Listen to a few tips on planning and how to monitor performance in the first few runs. Plus we read some PerfBytian emails in a new segment called the PerfBytes Inbox!

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 testers, James cracks himself up about Prancercize, and oh yeah, get out that old calculator from college.

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 to you. In other words...this is how to not end up listed on the PerfBytes News of the Damned.

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 latch conditions due to high-latency mobile traffic. We wrap everything together into a deep-fried taco wrap in a tortilla for this Cinco de Mayo edition of La Radio PerfBytes. ¿Puedes oírme ahora?

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 might even win a pair of PerfBytes shoes! 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.

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 brilliance about performance. This epsiode of PerfBytes will help you to transcend the lowly life in the lab and engage up-front with developers, product owners and stakeholders to raise their attention to the ever-increasing importance of performance. Where a user story fails to include performance criteria, you'll be there. When a developer fails to run multiple threads of a unit test, you'll be there. Able to construct an integrated performance test into a single nightly test run, it's you to the rescue! We can't promise that they'll give you a promotion, but you might start wearing a home-made super-hero costume with a capital 'P' enblazed across your chest.

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 place to test, sometimes you have no choice but to do your performance testing in production. In this episode of PerfBytes, James and I will give you some tips about how to conduct performance tests in production safely. Sure, we'll try and persuade you not to take the risk - but there are ways to do this, and there are partners that can help you do it right.

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 mistakes to avoid. We interview fellow PerfBytes contributor Scott Moore about his experiences attracting and retaining performance talent. James shares a crazy story about fraudulent resumes and we discuss tips for finding and hiring performance project managers.

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 about why we do the kinds of performance tests we do and the best way to expand the value of your performance testing efforts.