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My recent research on cloud performance

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on some research into the relative performance of various cloud offerings over recent weeks and I thought that it might be interesting to share my findings here. Last week my company published a whitepaper based on the research that I carried out over recent weeks comparing the relative performance of MS Azure, AWS and VMWare from a local IaaS provider. In each case we used the same two-tier application with the same test data and ran performance tests to see how each platform stood up to the load.

Surprisingly we ended up with results that showed that cloud could be both faster…and slower than physical hardware which seems to have caused some interest in the UK IT press.

http://www.businesscloudnews.com/infrastructure-as-a-service-/487-speed-of-cloud-no-issue-says-uk-specialists.html

http://forcearchitects.deliveredinnovation.com/2011/07/29/cloudup-7-29-2011/

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2097905/cloud-beats-physical-infrastructure-configuration

http://www.thedatachain.com/news/2011/7/cloud_is_just_as_fast_as_conventional_hosting_environments

http://www.retailtechnology.co.uk/news/cloud-fast-and-more-reliable-retailers

http://www.microscope.co.uk/cloud-is-as-fast-as-physical-servers-report-claims/

If you’d like to see the whitepaper, you can get a copy from this URL.

http://intechnica.co.uk/Events/How-Fast-Is-The-Cloud

I’d be interested in any feedback that the members of this group might have on the research.

All the best

Richard

The test application was nopCommerce which is a two-tier .NET application which uses a SQL back-end,

Surprisingly we ended up with results that showed that cloud could be both faster…and slower than physical hardware which seems to have caused some interest in the UK IT press.

Business Cloud News “Speed of cloud no issue, say UK specialists”

Force Architests “Cloudup 29th July 2011”

v3.co.uk “Cloud beats physical infrastructure if configuration is right“

The data chain “Cloud is just as fast as conventional hosting environments”

Retail Technology “Cloud: fast and more reliable for retailers?”

Microscope “Cloud is as fast as physical servers report claims“

If you’d like to see the whitepaper, you can get a copy from Intechnica.

I’d be interested in any feedback that any readers of these articles might have on the research.

Solution to problem when application stays minimised (Windows 7)

I had this problem today and it caused me some real grief until I sorted it out. I think that the problem is related to using difference screen resolutions at home and work. Yesterday I was working in the office where I typically use my laptop screen for monitoring e-mail, Twitter feeds etc. and my larger external monitor for “the task at hand”. Today I’m working at home where I have two large screens attached to my PC. To access information on my laptop, I typically RDP onto my laptop and display its output onto one of my two PC screens.

Some applications store information about the screen resolution and try to start up in the same positions as they were when you shut them down. This can cause problems. For example, this morning I tried to open an application, the application icon appeared in the windows taskbar but I couldn’t minimise or maximise the application. All I could do was close the application down by right clicking the icon in the taskbar.

To resolve this problem it is possible to maximise an application using the following steps. This ensures that the application becomes visible on a currently active screen.

Right click the taskbar to bring up task manager.

Right clickin the list of running applications and click Maximizeoday I’m working at home where I have two large screens attached to my PC. To access information on my laptop, I typically RDP onto my laptop and display its output onto one of my two PC screens.

Some applications store information about the screen resolution and try to start up in the same positions as they were when you shut them down. This can cause problems (as I discovered). For example, this morning I tried to open an application, the application icon appeared in the windows taskbar but I couldn’t minimise or maximise the application which meant that I couldn’t use it. All I could do was close the application down by right clicking the icon in the taskbar.

To resolve this problem it is possible to maximise an application using the following alternative method.
This ensures that the application becomes visible on a currently active screen.

Right click the taskbar to bring up task manager.
Right clickin the list of running applications and click Maximize.

A few tips on producing bulk test data

I recently had a requirement to run some performance tests against the nopCommerce open source eCommerce application. Whilst the default sample data was useful, if I really wanted to give the application a “work out”, I felt that I should create a large amount of test data.

I needed product descriptions, short descriptions and images for potentially thousands of products.
I considered taking content from other websites, but, conscious of the logal implications of doing this, I decided to produce my own data.

Images
To produce sample images, I took screenshots from the Intechnica company website and saved them as JPG files.
I then ran a batch file to make duplicate copies of each of these files.

e.g. To create 10 copies of a file called Image.jpg, use this command
for /l %i IN (1,1,10) DO COPY Image.jpg Image%i.jpg

Descriptions
To ensure that my test data was not always cached by the server, and was more representative of “real life” I needed to ensure that I used different descriptions for each product. This would ensure that my tests were production-like. I downloaded War and Peace from Project Gutenberg and used the UNIX “SPLIT” command to divide this text file into chunks. I chose 100 byte chunks for the short descriptions and 700 byte chunks for the long descriptions.

e.g. To split WarAndPeace.txt into 700 byte chunks, use this command. (SPLIT comes with CYGWIN)
split WarAndPeace.txt -b 700 -a 6 -d

This creates files called x000000, x000001, x000003 etc.
I needed to rename these to text files for simplicity so i used the DOS REN (rename) command to do this.

e.g. To rename all the new files in the folder
ren * *desc.txt