Performance By Design

This series of blog posts picks up on a topic I made mention of earlier, namely scalability models , where I wrote about how implicit models of application scalability often impact the kinds of performance tests that are devised to evaluate the performance of an application. As discussed in that earlier blog post, sometimes the influence of the underlying scalability model is subtle, often because the scalability model itself is implicit. In the context of performance testing, my experience is that it can be very useful to render the application’s performance and scalability model explicitly. At the very least, making your assumptions explicit opens them to scrutiny, allowing questions to be asked about their validity, for example. The example I used in that earlier discussion was the scalability model implicit when employing stress test tools like HP LoadRunner and Soasta CloudTest against a web-based application. Load testing by successively increasing the arrival rate of custo...