Qafoo GmbH - passion for software quality
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:Author: 		www-data
:Date:			Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:07:55 +0100
:Copyright:		All rights reserved

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Performance & Load Tests
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- Checklist For A Reliable Load-Test

  Setting up a load-test that produces results you can rely on is not that
  simple. But without realistic test-results you cannot be sure that your
  application handles sudden increases of traffic, rapid spikes or even the
  initial go-live. And you cannot estimate at which number of users you should
  scale up your hardware. Both details are very important to keep the
  application running at all times and guarantee that no revenue or developer
  sleep is lost because of outages. We have a large checklist of points we go
  through when setting up performance tests with customers and I wanted to
  discuss some of the more important points in this blog post.

- Why Apache Benchmark Is Not Enough

  You are working for months on a new web application or e-commerce system and
  usually a few weeks or just days before the launch a complete enough feature
  set is running on a production-like system so that you can run a realistic
  load-test. Hopefully providing you with accurate picture of the performance
  of your future system. What should you do, and why is Apache Benchmark
  usually not sufficient?

- Methods Of Teaching

  There are many different ways to teach topics of software developments. From
  recorded lectures to pair programming. Over the time we tried many of them
  with different customers and different topics. I want to provide you with an
  overview of what worked best for us for which topic.

- Scaling Constraints of Languages

  Micro-Services or any set of small services are common again right now.
  While it can make a lot of sense to use a dedicated service for a well
  defined problem those services are sometimes used just to play with a
  different server software. While it is pretty obvious for most that
  selecting the right database is important the same is true for selecting the
  right language (virtual machine) for the job.There are different types of
  services or server applications where different types of virtual machines
  (executing the opcodes / bytecode of the compiled source code) make more or
  less sense. What are the criteria we should base such a decision on and
  which language should we choose when?

- Common Bottlenecks in Performance Tests

  Most developers by now internalized that we should not invest time in
  optimizations before we know what happens exactly. This is true for
  optimizations in your PHP code but also for optimizations regarding your
  infrastructure. We should measure before we try to optimize and waste time.
  How can this be done?