Performance Management for Web 2.0 Solutions

Executive Summary

Before we proceed to discuss Performance Management in the world of Web 2.0 solutions, let us briefly examine where the core performance management disciplines evolved from. By doing so we can see that the fundamentals of Performance Management have not changed but in fact are required more than ever.

Storing Milliseconds in MySQL

NOTE: This doesn’t generate a timestamp accurate to milliseconds. It just stores it in two fields. AFAIK there is no way to generate such a thing. It is accurately described here. Sorry for the confusion =)

Bug #8523 details MySQL’s deficiency in its ability to store and retrieve datetime values with millisecond or microsecond precision. When [...]

Data Driven AutoIt Scripts

I’ve recently been playing around with AutoIt in an effort to steer clear of QTP and the like. AutoIt is a simple but effective way in which to automate pretty much any Windows GUI application. To that end I needed a simple data driven framework to include in the script. AutoIt comes with some handy [...]

Establishing Concurrency from your Web Logs

I recently had a conversation with a colleague about how one might determine the concurrency for a given page or transaction at any point in time. The system under test was a typical web server and we had access to the web logs for analysis.

That is, we wanted to know how many virtual users were [...]

Untangling Performance Test Terminology

Confused about the subtle differences between a stress test, performance test or a load test? Don’t get lost in the technobabble! Altentee uses the following terminology to help describe the different types of tests we conduct:

Shakeout – single script, single user, low volume scenarios whose main purpose is to confirm a correctly configured test harness [...]