A custom load harness for MQ Server

This is another blog in a similar vein to “No LoadRunner, No Problems” where I needed to write a custom test harness for MQ server. IBM kindly provide a complete Java API for getting in to the nitty gritty of MQ messages. Much can be learnt from WebSphere MQ sample code in Java and of [...]

Setting up Amazon S3 Storage on Windows …

If you are interested in using Amazon S3 as an alternative backup solution, you may need to move files from your windows box to the S3 storage account. In order to do this I recommend you use a version of rsync written in ruby.

Detailed instructions can be found in this post.

Getting busy with statistics

The screenshot you see is an example of the graphs you can output in my descriptive statistics Excel template without using any macros. I often find moving averages and boxplots / histograms to be extremely useful in analyzing raw data for stress and volume testing …

So what are my favourite descriptive statistics I like to [...]

No Load Runner? No problems!

Often you will find yourself just out of reach of some load test tools like LoadRunner, but don’t let that stop you generating load for your web apps. With enough patience and some careful use of live http headers you can achieve the same effect, albeit in a manually defined way. My BOLoader.pl script [...]

A Perl of an idea for try … catch clauses

The try…catch…finally clause found in languages like Java are very handy for error handling. In scripting languages like Perl you can achieve the same effect using the eval function as the following code snippet demonstrates.

eval{ &yourSubRoutine($parameters); };
$@ ? $yourLogObject->yourErrorMethod(“I failed with reason: $@”) ):
$yourLogObject->yourTraceMethod(“Everything was good: $?”) );