Broadcast May 5th, 2013

Our good friend and mobile gadget guru John Curtis from Black Falcon Consulting joins PerfBytes for a crazy conversation about mobile performance craziness. We chat about the true impact to your system performance caused by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and what you can do about it. John covers the marketing-simple ABC's for mobile performance and James offers up straight-ahead description of latch conditions due to high-latency mobile traffic. We wrap everything together into a deep-fried taco wrap in a tortilla for this Cinco de Mayo edition of La Radio PerfBytes. ¿Puedes oírme ahora?

Recorded Live on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 6pm PST

It's time for PerfBytes Live! Please join us at STPCON in April 2013 for a live broadcast recording of the PerfBytes podcast featuring your expertly equipped hosts Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley. This show will include our coverage of the STPCON news, current events, industry headlines, extemporaneous speaking from actual performance testers and live Q&A with the members of the audience. You might even win a pair of PerfBytes shoes! As supporters of the Software Test Professionals performance testing community, the PerfBytes podcast is powered by creative community-driven contributions and the overwhelming desire to improve performance testing practices across our industry. And pancakes.

Broadcast April 16th, 2013

It's a lonely life, if you're a performance tester in an agile shop. Your work is pushed to the end of the iteration and then they shut you in the lab for four days right before the release. Well, it's time to get performance up-and-out of the lab and build it into the sprint. That's right - you can become a fully-integrated part of the SCRUM as a performance engineer, enhancing each user story with your brilliance about performance. This epsiode of PerfBytes will help you to transcend the lowly life in the lab and engage up-front with developers, product owners and stakeholders to raise their attention to the ever-increasing importance of performance. Where a user story fails to include performance criteria, you'll be there. When a developer fails to run multiple threads of a unit test, you'll be there. Able to construct an integrated performance test into a single nightly test run, it's you to the rescue! We can't promise that they'll give you a promotion, but you might start wearing a home-made super-hero costume with a capital 'P' en-blazed across your chest.

Broadcast April 2nd, 2013

Production? You remember that system that has to keep running 24x7x365 to keep your customers happy, and employees productive and keep your organization's revenue stream going? Yeah, that one. Did you ever thing that doing destructive load or stress testing on that live system was a good idea? Whether your an external contractor testing over the internet or an internal testing team with no other place to test, sometimes you have no choice but to do your performance testing in production. In this episode of PerfBytes, James and I will give you some tips about how to conduct performance tests in production safely. Sure, we'll try and persuade you not to take the risk - but there are ways to do this, and there are partners that can help you do it right.

March, 19th, 2013 8AM EST

There is an old Pete Seeger song that goes like: "Where have all the Performance Gurus gone? Where can they be? (okay, perhaps that's not the exact lyric he wrote, I admit). But when it comes to building a performance team the first thing you've got to master is interviewing prospective performance engineering candidates. What questions to ask? How to structure the interviewing process? And what mistakes to avoid. We interview fellow PerfBytes contributor Scott Moore about his experiences attracting and retaining performance talent. James shares a crazy story about fraudulent resumes and we discuss tips for finding and hiring performance project managers.

March, 5th, 2013 8AM EST

Performance Tests, Stress Tests, Soak Tests, Spike Tests, Benchmarks and Baselines...lions and tigers and bears, oh my! In this episode of PerfBytes we'll take a closer look into the definitions for the most common types of performance testing because I know that James loves getting the question: "Hey James, what's the difference between Load Testing and Stress Testing?" You can find out more about why we do the kinds of performance tests we do and the best way to expand the value of your performance testing efforts.

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 8AM EST

Hey, who turned out the lights? Turn on a LAMP - that's the popular semi-standard configuration of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP which is employed across thousands of websites out there in the wilds of internet reality. Even major vendors like IBM and HP are behind the support for this nearly-enterprise-ready stack. Well, it would be totally enterprise ready if you can get it to scale and perform reliably enough to operate mission-critical applications. Join James and I for a sharing of our experiences tuning up LAMPs and illuminating the practices you'll need to succeed. Not that performance tuning wasn't already hard enough to do without proper lighting.

Guest Contributor: Scott Moore (@loadtester)

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013 8AM EST

It is not safe to drive a car with your eyes closed. It is also not safe to operate expensive, mission-critical computing systems without monitoring the performance. How much CPU did that query use? How much memory is being allocated/deallocated? How many bytes per second are being sent and received from the browser? Monitoring the resource utilization of your application is an absolutely essential part of making the neccessary calculations to properly test performance. Without those measurements, all you can do is take a guess? Client response time is only one part of the puzzle. Listen to this episode of PerfBytes to learn more about the other pieces of the puzzle and how to put them all together..

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 8AM EST

Dude, pull your head out of your cloud. You made the leap into the clouds - running new applications, migrating old ones and all the while trying to figure out how to manage and maintain this new shared and uncontrollable infrastructure's performance. In this episode of PerfBytes we'll spend time discussing the in's and out's of THE CLOUD and what steps you need to take to make good on all that elastic scalability and redundancy and cost-saving performance. Mark will share a poem about cloud-based load testing tools. James will have a rant about how you're making the cloud provider's financial dreams come true.

you cloud, so new
how funny is it you came from nowhere it seems, but look so familiar?
we can’t make you disappear with psychic psychokinesis
you cloud, so green
how safe you are stopping overheated spindle crashing heat from
nearly exploding transformers that should never have been relocated to an on-premise storage closet in Building 25 in the first place
you cloud, so cheap
how easy for you to throw “hardware” at a performance bottleneck
and it’s automated, syncopated and, well, it may not solve the problem anyway
you cloud, so confident
you and your perfect redundancy, never to waiver or stumble
reading the fine print shows your not-so-silver truths
you cloud.

-by Mark Tomlinson