Musings of a performance tester
Today I received a report from one of the sys admin types at work. The report showed performance of a server during a test which I ran last night. He used a tool called PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs).
The tool produces nice graphs, similar to Excel 2003 (it uses Microsoft Office Web Components to produce charts).
Google has launched a new initiative to encourage people to develop faster, more efficient web applications.
To do this, they have published tools for download (like Fiddler and HTTP Watch) on their website. They have also written articles which explain GZIP compression, prefetching, reducing HTML size and image sizes etc. These may all be of interest to performance testers as well as Google’s target audience (developers) so their site is well worth a read if you find yourself at a loose end.
http://code.google.com/speed – The main website
http://code.google.com/speed/articles/ – Articles describing different performance improving technologies / techniques
http://code.google.com/speed/downloads.html – Downloads of useful tools which can help developers to improve web performance.
Leo Borisov (Functional Architect at HP) posted this to a LinkedIn discussion group on LoadRunner.
I just downloaded this document and it looks pretty good, it contains details of the best performace counters to monitor for Windows and UNIX systems and has details of different web servers such as WebLogic, WebSphere, IIS etc.
Leo’s LinkedIn posting which explains how to download the document is reproduced below.
I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that the recently released Service Pack 1 for HP LoadRunner and HP Performance Center includes a “Performance Monitoring Best Practices” book. This is the first installment in the “HP Performance Engineering Best Practices” series that HP Software and Solutions intends to release on the regular basis. We have always recognized the fact that having best practices and methodology would greatly simplify the life of performance engineers and managers, and now we are beginning to fill this need.
The book is available with the SP1 installation. Access it from the product documentation library, or from the Help menu.
Updated link:
http://lrhelp.saas.hpe.com/en/latest/help/PDFs/Monitoring_BP.pdf
