Never give in

From a young age my Father always mandated, whatever adversity I faced, that I should never give in. I’ve lived by this mantra both in my personal life and work life.

We all face the “impossible task” at work.

“How will we ever manage to do this?”  “It can’t be done.”  “It’s impossible!”

Personally, I try to break down the problem. Try different ideas. Revisit prior work to see if the part solution can be found there and of course use the power of the internet.

With performance testing it’s all to easy to admit defeat when faced with a seemingly impossible task. However, we live in a technological age now where there are tools for many of the commonly faced challenges.

For example, web browsers, are now a invaluable tool in diagnosis. By launching the developer mode within the browser you can see the traffic passing through the page. A few years ago you’d have been using a network sniffer to see that level of detail.

An often forgotten gold mine of information lies in logs. Regardless of platform there will be logs at both application and system level.

Application monitoring tools can now help find the pinch point of performance by deploying agents and monitoring code.

If all else fails you can script and create solutions to diagnose the problem.

The purpose of this article is to remind you to see the bigger picture and systematically work through all of the information that is available to you. Performance testing is so much more than running a test and reporting response times. It’s understanding the performance of the target system. Unfortunately, there is no tool that “does it all”. Analyse all information that is available to you and solve the problem.