Category Archives: Performance Testing

Google tests new Flight Explorer service to help you buy the perfect plane ticket

Google appears to be testing a new service called Flight Explorer. The company has not announced it, nor is there any documentation available via any of Google’s help pages. It doesn’t even have a typical Google beta tag.

Yet the service is fully functional. It detects your current location and puts it in the “From” section. Then it appears to put the nearest country into the “To” section (since I’m in Canada, for me that’s the US).

Unlike Google Flights, which launched in September 2011, Flight Explorer appears to be much more customizable. Not only does it let you easily modify your trip length on the left-hand side, but the top bar is full of options: stops, airline, duration, outbound time, and return time. The first two are drop down menus while the other ones are sliders helping you pick the timeframe you want.

The default page loads the “Lowest fares for trips of 3-5 days” and the outline is clearly something we haven’t seen before. There’s a picture of your destination and then a graph of the lowest prices to get you there, taking your filters into account, for the last few months.

Clicking on any of them redirects you to Google Flights, suggesting that this appears to be an augmentation of the previous service, not a replacement. Maybe the two will end up being merged together, but for now they remain separate. Either way, the goal appears to be getting you to stick to Google when looking for an online flight booking service that will help you purchase airline tickets.

It’s unclear if Google has launched Flights Explorer recently, or if it is just testing it out. When we played with it, however, it was perfectly usable.

We have contacted Google about Flight Explorer. We will update this article if we hear back.

Update on December 13: Google says this is indeed just a test.

“Flight Explorer is a an experimental feature of Flight Search that allow users to explore flight destinations,” a Google spokesperson told TNW. “The feature enables users to consider multiple destinations and multiple days at once, all using live prices, quickly.”

Source:  http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/12/13/google-tests-new-flight-explorer-service-to-help-you-buy-the-perfect-plane-ticket/

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Performance testing in the cloud

As cloud computing continues to mature, one is hard pressed to identify a class of enterprise software that is not delivered and consumed as a service. Performance and load-based application testing, important parts of ALM, can be counted among these cloud offerings. Moving these functions to the cloud offers typical cloud benefits, most notably lowered capital and operational costs, and support for distributed development teams. But cloud-based testing also changes the way the tests themselves are performed. These changes come at a time when more and more organizations are looking at software as their competitive differentiator.

“Every enterprise is a software company, regardless of what they’re vertical is. Many of them are building more lines of code than major software companies per year. Software is the competitive difference in what everyone is doing now,” says Theresa Lanowitz, founder and analyst, voke.

One of the biggest challenges in application lifecycle management (ALM), according to Lanowitz, is performance. “Performance will make or break whether or not someone is going to use your app. If you think about the type of apps you use – enterprise or personal apps – performance is the determining factor, so make sure that performance is there and that you’re able to test appropriately for performance.”

This is especially true of Web and mobile applications. Fortunately, cloud-based performance and load testing tools make it easier than ever before to ensure that internal enterprise apps as well as external customer-facing applications can handle user demand. There are three characteristics of cloud-based testing services that change the way http and https applications are tested:

Testing at scale

Cloud-based testing providers offer a cost-effective means of testing applications at scale – as opposed to a lab environment that simulates a small subset of the production environment. This means that instead of testing an application against a portion of users and extrapolating that data to scale with a production environment, the cloud-testing provider can test your application against the actual number of expected users. SOASTA, for example, offers CloudTest, a functional and performance testing service for Web and mobile applications. In the case of performance testing, SOASTA uses cloud servers to simulate traffic that would come from users visiting a website.

Testing globally

Similarly, cloud-based testing tools enable testing on a global scale, thereby reflecting the regions from which users are accessing the application. This is often done through partnerships with other cloud providers, such as Amazon and Rackspace. For example, Blitz by Mu Dynamics allows customers to run load tests constituting millions of concurrent users coming from multiple continents.

Testing production apps

In addition to testing test and stage applications, cloud-based testing tools can be used to test production applications. This is, according to Sven Hammar, founder and CEO of Apica, “where you have all the complexity, all the right servers, the right number of users, and you get more feedback on the problem.” When testing in production, you’re testing at maximum capacity, and different problems arise than those that are encountered at medium capacity. As a result, you get a more realistic picture of what can go wrong and the ability to make adjustments before problems occur with users.

Advice for using Software Testing as a Service

When it comes to using tools like SOASTA, Blitz and Apica, Lanowitz offers several recommendations. First off, she says, “When using a test tool in the cloud, make sure you understand how licensing is working. How are you going to pay that vendor for using that tool in the cloud? Understand what you’re paying that tool vendor for and how your costs are going to be affected as you attempt to test for more users. Be aware of the hidden costs and be able to identify what your total cost is going to be.”

Secondly, Lanowitz advises organizations to understand the software vendor’s roadmap, including how they plan to put out different communications for the development lifecycle and how tests are reported. “Understand how to interpret, read and act on the advice from the tool,” she says.

Finally, “Do a proof of concept when adopting a new tool,” says Lanowitz. Determine the two or three tools that you think you might want to adopt and do a proof of concept on each one, looking at integration with other tools in use, how the tool works with your different platforms and, again, understanding the costs and how you’ll be paying for them, she says.

Source:http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/feature/Performance-testing-in-the-cloud

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HP brings performance testing to the cloud

With more applications being built for the Web, performance testing is critical to determining the proper approach to scaling both applications and infrastructure. But for many years performance testing was largely a rich-man’s game, primarily because of the expense of setting and maintaining a large server infrastructure that can simulate real-world traffic.

Hosted testing solutions make a lot of sense from both the user and provider perspective. Considering the vast computing power available at your fingertips there are few reasons why you would want to own the infrastructure, or not take advantage of the latest offerings from providers both large and small.

To that end, Hewlett-Packard is slated on Wednesday to announce LoadRunner in the Cloud, a new application performance testing suite running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Ironically, HP is extremely late to the game despite having long held the lead in performance testing via its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in November 2006.

A number of companies, including Sauce Labs and BrowserMob have seen a great deal of success with their cloud-based offerings. And each player brings a unique angle to the offerings. Sauce Labs is based on the open-source Selenium project and gives users the option to run the code themselves or consume it as a service, whereas BrowserMob has expanded into offering monitoring in addition to testing.

Overall, performance and other testing via cloud-based services remains one of the more logical, accessible use cases to prove out the cloud as a necessary part of one’s infrastructure.

To it’s credit, HP has been making some moves into the cloud ecosystem, but there is still a long way to go for any tech vendor trying to usurp Amazon’s domination as a provider of cloud infrastructure services.

Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20005276-62.html

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Cloud Performance Testing Tool Launched by Impetus

Impetus Technologies announced the release of SandStorm CE (SandStorm CloudEdition), a cloud-enabled version of its performance testing tool. SandStorm CE helps in saving the license and hardware provisioning costs, as well as offers affordable performance testing, with a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model.

With the release of SandStorm CE, Impetus provides its customers, enterprises, start-ups and ISVs an easy provisioning to load test their software at hugely reduced costs. It also reduces the customers’ CAPEX by automatically provisioning a cluster of servers and machines on the cloud, as and when needed. This helps customers test their applications against a concurrency of 50 – 200,000 users, with the same ease.

SandStorm CE helps test the performance of applications hosted in customers’ DMZ, datacenter or the cloud, seamlessly. The solution offers a ‘ready to use environment,’ and provides realistic test conditions across the application’s entire delivery chain from different parts of the globe.

SandStorm quickly identifies application bottlenecks and helps predict its reliability, scalability and performance issues. SandStorm is the only tool to provide multi-protocol support in a single package with easy parameterization of FLEX, AJAX, Silverlight and Applet based applications. Its integrated resource monitoring and intuitive real time status reporting enables high-end analytics and extract capabilities.

It helps reduce the performance engineering costs by at least 30%, vis-à-vis other popular load testing tools. Impetus offers comprehensive services around performance engineering, including performance testing and sizing, system diagnostics, performance tuning and optimization and capacity planning, among others.

Read More:

http://www.cloudcomputingdevelopment.net/cloud-performance-testing-tool-launched-by-impetus/

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The Differences between Performance Testing and Stress Testing

Performance testing is used to test the performance of software in a system. The performance testing can be done in every period of testing. Even in the element layer, the performance of a single module can also be evaluated by doing white-box testing. However, when the whole system is integrated, the actual performance of the system can be really tested.

Performance testing is often done with stress testing, and needs hardware and software testing equipments, which means, it is necessary to measure the use of resources in a demanding environment (for example, the processor cycle). The outward testing equipments can monitor the testing, when something happens (such as interruptions), it can record it. By testing the system, testers can find what reduces the efficiency and what causes the system bugs.

Stress testing is a kind of test which adds stress continuously to the system. By determining a system’s choke point or a failed performance point, the testing will enable you to know the maximum service level of the system. For example, you can measure when the system’s performance will decline or when it breaks down.

Performance test is a common used term when doing load test and force test alternately. Performance testing puts emphasis on the overall system. It has close relationship with the intensity, stress/load testing. Accordingly, stress and intensity testing should be done with performance testing.

The difference between stress testing and performance testing is their aim of the testing.

The aim of stress testing is to figure out the maximum load the system can support. The precondition is that the performance of the system can be tolerated. For example, it is usually agreed that the page should respond within 3 seconds. In a word, it tests the maximum load the system can bear on the condition that the performance can be tolerated.

Performance testing is for testing the response and the speed of the system and other performance indexes. Its precondition is that there is a certain load. For example, it will test the performance indexes when 100 users are online, and see if every user can operate normally. To sum up, it tests the performance of the system according to some indexes (such as the time of response) with different load (or with a certain load). If we say, some website performs badly, but to be exact, we should say, when how many people are online, the website performs badly.

In general, it is like a formula: overall performance=the load quantity*performance index. The overall performance is fixed, and stress testing is to test the biggest load when the performance indexes are the lowest, and performance test is to test the performance indexes when the load quantity is determined.

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Hypertable Beats HBase Thoroughly in Performance Test

About Hypertable

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Hypertable system includes three components: Hyperspace, Master and Range Server. Hyperspace is a lock service, akin to Google’s Chubby, mainly used for synchronization and testing whether there’s node failure and storing the top-level location information. Master is used to complete task allocation, future load balancing and post-disaster reconstruction (Automatically recover services after Range Server fails), and other functions. Range Server is the actual workers of Hypertable, primarily responsible for providing services for the data in a Range. Moreover, it shoulders the responsibility of reconstruction, ie replaying the local log to restore the former state before its own fault. Additionally, it accesses Hypertable client and other components.

Introduction

Both Hypertable and HBase are scalable open source database products, and their design blueprint based on Google BigTable. The main difference is that Hypertable relies on C++ language, and HBase is written based on Java. The test environment is 16 servers which are connected through Gigabit Network.

Test Environment:

OS: CentOS 6.1

CPU: 2X AMD C32 Six Core Model 4170 HE 2.1 Ghz

RAM: 24GB 1333MHz DDR3

Disk: 4X 2TB SATA Western Digital RE4-GP WD2002FYPS

The NameNode running of Hypertable and HBase is on No.1 test machine, while DataNodes is running on No.4 to No.5 test machine. Meanwhile, RangeServer and RegionServers run on the same set of computers and are configured to use all memory resources. Three Zookeeper and Hyperspace copies run on the No.1 and No.3 test machines. In this test, the table is configured to use Snappy compression, as well as use Bloom filters to load Row Key.

Random Write Test

In the random write test, Hypertable and HBase test writing four different 5TB of data, using the values 10000, 1000, 100 and 10, respectively. At the same item, the key is fixed at 20 bytes and format the random integer into zero fill.

The following chart shows the test results:

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The detailed performance test results:

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The HBase throws an exception in the key test of 41 billion and 167 billion due to HBase RegionServers concurrent mode failure. No matter how to configure, when the speed that RegionServer produces useless data is faster than the Java garbage collection, the failure above will occur. Creating new garbage collection plan to solve the problem; however, it will take a heavy price for the run-time performance.

Matthew Hertz and Emery D. Berger published “Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management” at OOPSLA Conference in 2005, which provided a solid faith.

Random Read Test

The test mainly uses a set of random read request test to query throughput. Each system runs two tests, one to test Zipfian distribution, another to uniform distribution. The inserted key/value are fixed size, key to use fixed 20 bytes, and value to use fixed 1KB. The keys range from the integer in ASCII. Each query test returns a pair of keys. Run two tests on each system separately, one to load 5TB data and another to 0.5TB, which makes the experiment to be able to measure the performance of system memory to disk. 4,901,960,784 keys are loaded in 5TB test while 490,196,078 keys in 0.5TB test. The test client runs 128 processes (for a total of 512 process), and keep the maximum 512 queries in the whole testing process at the same time. This means each test issues 100 million queries.

Zipfian Distribution Environment Test

Configure Hypertable query cache to 2GB, and use the default value of block cache and memstore of HBase to keep good performance of HBase. See the following figure:

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The detailed performance test results:

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The main reason to lead to the difference is that Hypertable provides query cache and HBase can realize query cache as well, but Hypertable is subsystem of HBase. The subsystem generates a lot of garbage. Although it will improve the performance of HBase, it also brings some disadvantages, especially in ultra-large-scale write and large cell calculation of mixed workloads.

Uniform Distribution Test Environment

See the following figure:

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The detailed performance test results:

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The performance of HBase is close to Hypertable in the uniform distribution test, which should be due to disk IO bottleneck. Some garbage is also produced during the test.

Conclusion

In the past five years, Hypertable community has been working to perfect products. They aim at building Hypertable as a large data field of high-performance, high scalable database solution.

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The World’s Largest Performance Testing Platform

SOASTA, the leader in cloud-based performance testing, today launched CloudTest Pro, a new appliance that delivers the world’s largest platform for testing the performance of Web and mobile applications. With SOASTA CloudTest Pro, testing teams have full control to build, execute and analyze performance tests, with the flexibility to launch tests on a single platform that integrates data center infrastructure and private clouds with external resources including public clouds.

CloudTest Pro represents the first commercial software solution that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous clouds and other resources to create a truly global test platform. Today, SOASTA customers can affordably test even the largest consumer-facing Web and mobile applications at scale with resources that span enterprise hybrid and private clouds such as those built with technologies from VMware, Eucalyptus Systems and Cloud.com; public clouds including Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Amazon Web Services; and test communities like uTest.

“The massive resources of ‘the cloud’ have changed the game for performance testing, enabling organizations to test their consumer-facing Web and mobile applications fast, affordably, and at scale,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. “There’s now no excuse for the type of Web site disasters we’ve seen in the past that cost businesses millions in revenues and perhaps more in reputation.

“SOASTA has pioneered cloud testing, and we are thrilled to take it to the next level with CloudTest Pro,” continued Lounibos. “Effective Web site performance testing can reach a massive scale, and it’s important that customers have the freedom to efficiently and securely utilize their own internal infrastructure, as well as public clouds and test communities, to get the resources they need for internal and external performance testing. CloudTest Pro is breaking new ground not just for performance testing, but for the industry, as it helps our customers realize the potential of cloud computing.”

SOASTA CloudTest Pro is designed for businesses with internal testing teams that want full command of their performance testing. It supports continuous testing in the lab and in live production environments, testing from internal and external sources, and real-time resolution of performance issues. CloudTest Pro puts all the benefits of SOASTA’s award-winning on-demand CloudTest technology into the hands of customers, including an unparalleled capacity to quickly and affordably scale to millions of concurrent users. As more and more business is conducted through Web and mobile applications, SOASTA CloudTest products can ensure both business agility and high service quality.

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Read More:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-SOASTA-CloudTest-Pro-bw-2602031541.html?x=0&.v=1

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