Load Testing Blog
Web Performance Race Car Takes Third at the Charlotte Motor Speedway
The Charlotte Motor Speedway is perhaps better known for NASCAR, but recently it was host to the Web Performance car in the Spec E30 NASA Firecracker Run on July 2, 2010 where our where our rookie driver Jason Tower finished third for his first podium finish!
The two heat series started off on the right foot with Jason qualifying for second place, putting him on the front row for pacing before the green flag is thrown. The whole point of a spec class in the cars are as identical as possible, so this course is particularly interesting because … Continue reading »
How to Get Your First and Second Jobs in the Tech Industry
First, this blog post is just my opinion based on my hiring experiences. Other hiring managers are sure to have other priorities, so take this advice with a grain of salt and use what you can. As a bit of background, I graduated in 1987 with an BSEE from The Ohio State University, and over the years have interviewed many job candidates, either directly hiring or giving my opinions on dozens of entry-level and senior candidates for programming, systems administration, and other positions. What this did is give me the opportunity to see correlations between how candidates presented themselves … Continue reading »
Velocity Web Performance Conference 2010 Day Two
Static vs. Dynamic Web Performance
Last week I attended Oreilly’s Velocity Conference in San Jose, the only conference solely dedicated to the subject of website performance and testing. It was sold out for the first time; many of the presentations were standing room only and I was unable to get a room at the hotel.
One distinction that I was disappointed that was overlooked is the difference between static and dynamic web performance. All of the performance issues in the presentations I heard were all related to static web page performance, which is how long a web page takes to … Continue reading »
Velocity Web Performance Conference 2010 Day One
Velocity Conference Day 1
Last week I was in San Jose at Oreilly’s Velocity Conference, the only conference solely dedicated to the subject of website performance and testing.
The first talk of the day was Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website, given by Sean Power, one of the authors of Complete Web Monitoring. He is an excellent speaker, and the talk was full of good information. These are my thoughts on the subjects he brought up, but includes quite a bit of my own extrapolations from his thoughts, and will try to make it clear … Continue reading »
Performance Lessons at the Virginia International Raceway
Web Performance, Inc. is a sponsor of Jason Tower’s Spec E30 racing season this year, and he invited me to Virginia International Raceway to check out our logo on his car, and to try my hand at driving on the track in a HPDE (High Perforformance Driver’s Education) event sponsored by the Tarheel Sports Car Club. As you can see above, the logo looks great on his car alongside the logos of several other local tech. companies.
My hopes of driving Jason’s race car at high speed were dashed when I was told that according … Continue reading »
StarEast Software Testing Conference – Day One
I’m in Orland this week attending the 2010 StarEast conference for software testing, and was surprised at how much hadn’t changed. Its been over a decade since my last tech conference, and while the names have changed, the actual recommended practices haven’t changed much at all. Speakers are still preaching the values of early testing, automated test suites, and automated build processes that I learned as a young engineer at Sun Microsystems 20 years ago, but now they’re called “agile” and “ATDD“.
The only controversial statement of the day was in Jeff Payne’s opening keynote, … Continue reading »
Large Load Tests on the Cheap
Need to generate thousands of concurrent users but don’t want to pay big bucks for a large license? You may not know that licenses to generate 1,000 or more concurrent users are available on a week-by-week basis. And now that Load Tester 4 can automatically generate massive amounts of load against data centers, leasing makes even more sense.
For existing customers, this means they can purchase a lower-level license for day-to-day use, and then just lease the larger licenses for a big final round of testing. We’ve had a tremendous response from existing customers who normally test … Continue reading »
Jason Tower Places Second at BMWCCA Road Atlanta
Jason Tower, in his Web Performance-sponsored BMW Spec E30, took second place last weekend at his most recent road race. He had never driven the Atlanta course before – nice job, Jason! Watch his in-car video (wow, that looks fast!) and hear more about the race on his blog.
Jason Tower BMW Spec E30 racing update
This past weekend, Jason Tower ran in his first event of the year, the Winter Meltdown at CMP. Jason qualified 5th, but was gridded at the back of the pack because of his rookie status. He managed to move up a few slots to finish 9th. Except for a tiny bit of “paint trading”, the car performed great and there were no incidents. Kudos to Jason for being so well prepared. Web Performance is proud to be one of his sponsors!
Jason is racing Next week at Road Atlanta for a race with … Continue reading »
Velocity Conference – Day 3
A great deal of time at the Velocity Conference has been spent on client-side performance optimization. This encompasses changes to the page structure and sub-elements to speed the delivery of a usable page to the user. Here at Web Performance, we have primarily been concerned with server-side performance – due to our focus on load-testing. Client-side optimization, however, benefits the users even when the server is not under load. It is something that we would like to expend more effort on when working with our clients.
Some of the most common client-side optimization techniques discussed were:
1) Reducing round-trips to the server
reduce … Continue reading »
