Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Often when performance testing in a black box environment, you are left with the onerous responsibility to report against response time performance.
A typical approach by performance testers is to rely on 95th percentiles, which is effectively a Service Level Agreement (SLA) saying that 95 percent of all my samples have ...
Posted in LoadRunner, Analysis, Tools, JMeter | 5 Comments »
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I've been working on a light weight performance monitoring solution which can be hosted on a LAMP (or WAMP, or OSX =) installation and uses the Google chart API to present data. Data is populated by custom Ruby scripts that either use ssh or perfmon (typeperf) to collect performance metrics ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis, Tuning, SiteScope | No Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
After getting nowhere with lack luster HP support, I turned to the power of the Open Source community and got a very simple script up and running to remotely monitor Weblogic JVM Performance and JMS queues using JMX and JRuby.
Despite having some initial issues with the code, the author of ...
Posted in LoadRunner, Ruby, Analysis, Weblogic, SiteScope | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
HP LoadRunner Analysis is a free tool right? Well, maybe not "free, as in free beer", but you can certainly install the trial version of LoadRunner 9.x, and Analysis does not appear to be time limited.
All right, I realise that the Controller is time limited, so how do you go ...
Posted in LoadRunner, Solaris, Analysis, Tuning | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Google have got some charting code worth looking at, which basically allows you to create charts by modifying parameters in the query string.
Something as simple as this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Tim's%20Beer%20Intake&cht=p3&chd=s:9h&chs=250x100&chco=00ff00&chl=Unemployed|Employed produces this:
Being on holidays at the moment, I'm lacking the um, 'project' on which to apply this technology, but am curious ...
Posted in Analysis, Productivity, Programming | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
I've explored in previous posts the use of tools such as onboard Analytics (LoadRunner), off-the-shelf tools (Excel) and custom web based implementations (JGraph, ChartDirector) used to analyze the nitty gritty of performance metrics.
All of these tool's use are governed by some common factors being:
the Expediency factor - the timeliness of ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis | 4 Comments »
Friday, November 23rd, 2007
I've been looking for some easy ways to enumerate all of the available performance counters on a Win32 platform programatically.
Rather than trawl through the PerfMon counter GUI, or regress back into the millions of raw counters available via WMI, I was looking for a solution somewhere in between.
The ActiveState version ...
Posted in Perl, Win2K3, Analysis, Tools, Tuning, Windows | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Any job in which you need to 'fix' something requires you to correctly analyze the root cause. Treat just the symptoms and you'll find yourself on the never-get-fixed roundabout ...
Performance tuning fits this profile neatly. In an array of available metrics, how do you avoid chasing the symptoms and never ...
Posted in Analysis, Testing | 2 Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Needed to break a large file containing many messages, each message separated on a new line into many new small files containing only one message per file ... Started thinking in perl, but almost looked past the Unix split command:
split -l 1 -a 3 bigfile.txt smallfile_
-l 'n' will put 'n' ...
Posted in Analysis, Unix | No Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Jason Gorman describes in his article 6 requirements for the practical use of dashboards in performance related testing.
As a performance tester, I find that I often need to provide snapshot summaries of systems performance ala dashboards. The key requirement imposed is normally timeliness and relevance of data being presented.
So sticking ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis, Tuning | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
It has long since annoyed me and no doubt numerous others, the inability of Excel to get beyond 65,536 rows of data or more simply 2^16 ...
A deft upgrade to Office 2007 sees an improvement in this limitation and am now able to have at least 1M rows of data. ...
Posted in General, Analysis, Tools | No Comments »
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 | 3 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
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 »
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, December 18th, 2006
Recently I found myself in a performance test analyst role on a unix system with no access to customised tools for collecting performance statistics such as Compuware QALoad or Mecury LoadRunner. Not to worry, Solaris 9 comes with a bucket load of native tools that allow you to easily collect ...
Posted in Statistics, Solaris, Analysis, Tuning | No Comments »
