Monthly Archives: November 2011

Finally… How the Strangeloop Site Optimizer works (video edition)

Anyone who works here at Strangeloop can tell you how long I've been gunning for a video that explains how our Site Optimizer works. Finally, here it is.

Performance By Design II

By Jason Buksh

In my last article (Performance By Design- An Agile Approach) I essentially outlined a method for ensuring performance is enforced throughout a project from the onset. ‘Performance by Design’ in this context is a misnomer. True “Performance by Design” is abstract; it’s about taking good design practices and ensuring the product is fundamentally scalable. Performance by...

Recording mobile device traffic for performance testing iPhone, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile applications with HP Loadrunner

By Richard Pal

Want to write a performance test that will replicate the traffic of an actual hardware device such as an iPad, iPhone or Android device? This article covers a useful technique to capture and replay the network traffic of real mobile devices. In my previous blog the Android SDK’s emulator has been used to run the mobile...

Web performance just became seriously mainstream

By Josh Bixby

We've been saying for months that this year is going to mark a new highwater point for site site speed. I think it's safe to say that it doesn't get much more mainstream than this two-minute segment on CNBC's Power Lunch.

Performance By Design – an Agile Approach

By Jason Buksh

I recently attended a Test Managers Forum in London and sat in on a presentation entitled ‘Performance By Design’ (TODO: Insert Credit). The presentation didn’t deliver any earth shattering content and I felt that a lot of the audience hadn’t quite grasped the concept (as I had not). There was something there – but...

The day StumbleUpon stumbled: Why we removed the SU button from our sites

By Josh Bixby

Is this day and age, third-party content providers need to make their scripts load asynchronously in order not to bog down page load. StumbleUpon didn't, and as a result, we removed their script from our websites.

Recording and Performance testing Android applications with HP Loadrunner VuGen

By Richard Pal

In this article I will show how to create a Loadrunner test to replicate the network traffic generated by an Android application. The Android SDK will be used to execute the application under test, while HP Loadrunner Virtual User Generator (VuGen) captures the network packets and translates it to Loadrunner virtual user script. Prerequisites:...

Using Gossip Protocols for Failure Detection, Monitoring, Messaging and Other Good Things

By Todd Hoff

When building a system on top of a set of wildly uncooperative and unruly computers you have knowledge problems: knowing when other nodes are dead; knowing when nodes become alive; getting information about other nodes so you can make local decisions,...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 11, 2011

By Todd Hoff

You got performance in my scalability! You got scalability in my performance! Two great tastes that taste great together: Quotable quotes: @jasoncbooth : Tired of the term #nosql. I would like to coin NRDS (pronounced "nerds"), ...

10 Core Architecture Pattern Variations for Achieving Scalability

By General Chicken

Srinath Perera has put together a strong list of architecture patterns based on three meta patterns: distribution, caching, and asynchronous processing. He contends these three are the primal patterns and the following patterns are but different...