PerfBytes

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 reliably enough to operate mission-critical applications. Join James and I for a sharing of our experiences tuning up LAMPs and illuminating the practices you'll need to succeed. Not that performance tuning wasn't already hard enough to do without proper lighting. Originally posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013. Special features include a Perf Rant from Scott Moore (@loadtester) www.northwaysolutions.com

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 essential part of making the necessary calculations to properly test performance. Without those measurements, all you can do is take a guess? Client response time is only one part of the puzzle. Listen to this episode of PerfBytes to learn more about the other pieces of the puzzle and how to put them all together.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, February 5th, 2013 8AM EST

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 elastic scalability and redundancy and cost-saving performance. Mark will share a poem about cloud-based load testing tools. James will have a rant about how you're making the cloud provider's financial dreams come true.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 8AM EST

Additional Content:
http://www.perfbytes.com/you_cloud

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 puzzle: the client-side. There's been an explosion of tools and techniques around browser optimization and performance analysis, since the first time Steve Souders released the first version of YSlow! Now we have a twitter hash tage #WPO, meetup groups from New York to Seattle, to Frankfurt and Beijing. Vendors are rampantly adding "web performance" capabilities in their existing tools - trying to catch-up with the myriad open-source utilities employed by engineers learning the #WPO craft. This episode of PerfBytes will jump into the party and pass around a wealth of advice and context to understand the Web Performance Optimization fad.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 8AM EST

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 Year of Performance. We'll hear your stories about 2012 performance - like the time you added 4 indexes to the same entity in the database without updating the stats, or the time you though the new web servers would magically be added to the load balancer VIP - but instead, everything came crashing down around you!? We'll hear stories from load testers, app developers, database engineers, networking engineers and maybe even some DevOps-y gurus about what they're planning to do differently in 2013 to avoid next year's performance hangover.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 12PM EST

"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 non-functional requirements and performance user stories. How to get started with performance test objectives - how to engage the business owners and stakeholders and how to document and translate those requirements into an effective performance test.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

Guests: Perf Rant from Scott Barber (@sbarber) www.perftestplus.com

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 actually was forced to lay hands physically on a piece of hardware, most of us performance testers are still expected to be just as effective testing on these abstracted virtual systems. In this show the PerfBytes guys will review the challenges, pitfalls and good practices to conduct your load testing with shared resources and consolidated data sources. James gets to do a Perf Rant about running load generators on virtual machines.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Guests: Alon Girmonsky (@alongir) from Blazemeter.com

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 the changes committed in time. And now hopefully you have time to call in to PerfBytes and tell us all about it!! We'd love to hear from you folks who have been actively engaged in preparation for what is sure to be the worst day in Internet history. Mark reads a poem about SWAT team performance testing - something to soothe the load tester's soul. James rants about bad configuration for connection pooling.

Original Air Date: Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Additional Content:
http://www.perfbytes.com/howtocookyourwebsiteforthanksgiving
http://www.perfbytes.com/holidayhaiku

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: 11/6/2012

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