Web 2.0, RIA, AJAX and SOA are terms and abbreviations we hear and use on a daily basis. But do we know what they mean for us as professional performance testers? This document provides an overview of the relevant Web2.0 terms and elaborates on how to run performance tests on these applications. The document targets the performance testing professional as well as the R&D manager looking for information on how to prepare for this new era.
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Typical content distribution solutions are based on placing dedicated equipment inside or at the edge of the Internet. The best example of such solutions is Akamai [1], which runs several tens of thousands of servers all over the world. In recent years, a new paradigm for Content Distribution has emerged based on a fully distributed architecture where commodity PCs are used to form a cooperative network and share their resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth).
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HP Email Archiving software for Microsoft Exchange is client software that integrates with HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP) to help you mitigate the business risk associated with legal discovery, corporate governance, and regulatory compliance requirements, reduce the cost of email storage, and boost messaging server performance and availability. HP Email Archiving software for Microsoft Exchange integrates with Microsoft Outlook and OWA to provide a seamless, nearly transparent user interface where archived messages can still be accessed through users’ standard Outlook interface.
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Unisys and Microsoft have dispelled the perception that for high performance ETL, the only alternative is a UNIX-based solution. With SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, Microsoft and Unisys deliver an optimized ETL solution that will support even the most demanding enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives. They conducted a series of real ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) tests with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS, formerly known as DTS). Performance tests compared throughput, scalability and performance on both 32- and 64-bit processor configurations on a Unisys ES7000. SSIS demonstrated parallelism and the ability to utilize all available CPUs in multiple aggregation, parallel lookup and transformation testing.
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An important argument for the introduction of software managed clusters is that of scale: By constructing the cluster out of commodity compute elements, one can, by simply adding new elements, improve the reliability of the overall system in terms of performance and in availability. The limits to how far such a cluster can be scaled seems to be dependent on the scalability of its management software, which in its core has a collection of distributed algorithms to guarantee the correct operation of the cluster. The complexity of these algorithms makes them a vulnerable component of the system in terms of their impact on the overall scalability of the system.
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Unisys and Microsoft collaborated on a proof of concept to demonstrate that the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 product suite will support even the most demanding enterprise business intelligence initiatives. The proof of concept shows that SQL Server 2005 can deliver the same or better results for a high-performance enterprise-class data warehouse than the more-costly alternatives.
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When users ask for advice about their database applications, one of the first things I try to help them with is the normalization of their table structure. Normalization is the process of removing redundant data from your tables in order to improve storage efficiency, data integrity and scalability. This improvement is balanced against an increase in complexity and potential performance losses from the joining of the normalized tables at query-time.
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The Web paradigm adds a whole new level of complexity to traditional application development. The phrase “You’ve got just 15 seconds to grab a user’s attention” is fast becoming a cliché, but it really sums up the idea. You’re no longer just creating an application, but a commercial or a TV show, and the user has his or her hand on the remote. It’s called surfing the Web for a reason. As a developer, you need to be keenly aware of the impact of architectural and implementation decisions on application performance and scalability. With this technology, as we are discovering, we are still dealing with a client/server model.
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