Archive for 2007
Friday, September 28th, 2007
Recently I have been trying to determine what the impact of using MQ message persistence is on disk subsystem performance. There is alot of literature from IBM recommending ideal configurations to support MQ persistence, so I won't turn this into a post that recommends ideal settings. What I did want ...
Posted in MQ, Solaris, Hardware, Analysis, Tuning | 4 Comments »
Monday, September 24th, 2007
CPAN provides a great module for Perl called WWW:Mechanize. To quote CPAN:WWW::Mechanize, or Mech for short, helps you automate interaction with a website. It supports performing a sequence of page fetches including following links and submitting forms. Each fetched page is parsed and its links and forms are extracted. A ...
Posted in Perl, Testing | No Comments »
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
I've been using a MacBook Pro for about 12 months now, and whilst I love this machine and its capabilities, it does tend to run at high temperatures. I use my laptop as a desktop replacement mostly, and whilst on my desk, I pretty much run parallels (virtual machines) all ...
Posted in OSX, Hardware | No Comments »
Friday, August 10th, 2007
So I spent the best part of a day assisting our sys admin and developer resolve MQ errors that a COBOL client was throwing when opening more than one concurrent connection to a clustered queue manager.
Because the architecture had recently changed to a cluster, and my load harness was no ...
Posted in MQ, Backup, Analysis, Testing | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
IIS logs if setup properly can be an extremely useful source of information during load testing and for other activities such as capacity planning. Another load tester sings its praise here and provides good justification of why you should use it.
The log parser comes for free with the IIS resource ...
Posted in Win2K3, IIS, Logs, Analysis | No Comments »
Monday, August 6th, 2007
Amazon web services development domain have provided some neat perl code here such that you can simply put, get or delete objects inside an Amazon S3 storage bucket with something like this:
./s3curl.pl --id=[aws-access-key-id] --key=[aws-secret-access-key] -- http://s3.amazonaws.com/[bucket-name]/[key-name]
I modified the author's code to make it a bit more win32 friendly, as ...
Posted in Perl, Backup | No Comments »
Monday, August 6th, 2007
I often use a combination of cygwin with ssh to remotely manage windows servers, as I find this to be a quicker (and hopefully safer) method of access to my windows boxes. To that end, I often need to check windows application event logs. Typically you'd use the mmc, but ...
Posted in Perl, Win2K3, Security, Analysis | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
I've been having a lot of problems with my Apple mighty mouse lately. Particularly with the scroll wheel which would scroll up but not down. I think eating chips and surfing the web was getting things too greasy. Apple lend us some advice here on how to clean your wheel ...
Posted in General, Hardware | No Comments »
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
As my current contract with Telstra comes to a close, test summary reports are signed off and my brain approaches shutdown mode in preparation for a 5 week holiday, I decided to give my Mac Book Pro a much needed crash diet.
Like owner like macbook, this beast was getting a ...
Posted in General, OSX | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
Statistics (and the ability to gather/present) are an essential tool for performance testing. At the time of learning basic stats in high school and university I was plagued with the problem of not seeing the real life application of these tools. Sure, exercises and scenarios conducted simulated real life, but ...
Posted in Statistics, Perl, Maths | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 25th, 2007
Once again on the topic of performance testing Business Objects, when executing a benchmark for a web intelligence report with goal being to see how many concurrent users it could support, the following error mesage was being generated in the vuser log:
Connection failed. The server has reached the maximum number ...
Posted in LoadRunner, BO, Tuning | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
I find when testing I need to archive copious amounts of data. Occasionally I need to create a bootable disk image for use in the creation of virtual machines or impromptu test labs. Storing this information and images in the ISO format is quite handy.
Most people will already know how ...
Posted in OSX | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 18th, 2007
If you have the requirement to manipulate multitudes of input messages / log files / data templates with dynamic variables, you may be left wondering what is the best approach. One could argue in a friendly way for hours about which language is the best to achieve this outcome (almost ...
Posted in Perl, Programming | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 18th, 2007
I have been working on some template LoadRunner scripts for Business Objects Web Intelligence / Crystal Reports which require good ole fashioned manual correlation.
Before writing this post, in the background I have been working on a tool comparison between LoadRunner and my increasing favourite JMeter with a simple (?) scripting ...
Posted in LoadRunner, BO, Testing | 6 Comments »
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
For an internet facing SSH server, it is probably common practice to have sshd listening on a non-standard port. Coupled with key pair authentication, this reduces the profile you present to simple brute force attacks.
Connecting to a SSH server on a non standard port is relatively simple:
ssh -p username@servername.com
You ...
Posted in Win2K3, Network, Security | No Comments »
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
An associate of mine recently wanted a load script that could simulate thousands of UDP packets carrying a custom payload coming from different IP addresses. They were implementing a customised RFID solution that needed to simulate load from a lot of sources (think active RFID tags).
There are many different ways ...
Posted in Ruby, Network, Testing | No Comments »
Monday, April 30th, 2007
When load testing MQ you are no doubt going to need to be able to monitor queue statistics in terms of how many messages have been enqueued and dequeued within a given timeframe. You can use native runmqsc commands to query queues in order to find current queue depths but ...
Posted in MQ, Statistics, Java, Analysis | No Comments »
Monday, April 30th, 2007
Recently I wrote a test harness that had a 'discovery' mode. That is, given a target service level agreement (SLA), what transaction pacing or throughput did the load harness have to apply in order to achieve the SLA response times. Now my maths is a tad scratchy, but I knew ...
Posted in Java, Maths, Tuning | No Comments »
Friday, March 30th, 2007
When installing the NuSOAP class on a system with PHP5, you may get the following error:
"Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class soapclient in ../nusoap.php on line 7240"
A quick google search will reveal the following cause.
As PHP5 already has a built in class called soapclient, this is where the clash is...
The ...
Posted in SOAP, PHP, Programming | No Comments »
Friday, March 30th, 2007
Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. Thankfully the peeps at growl have afforded us integration with applescripts. I use growl notifications to provide a bit more feedback when backing up my mac to a USB drive. Good ...
Posted in OSX | No Comments »
