Performance Engineering
“Is there anything worse than hearing a journalist mention something cool about your web site, just to discover that the hundreds of thousands of excess visitors just made it collapse and that thanks to their preferred search engine they found their product on a competitor’s site?”
– From the dpbench project, a collaborative effort from HAProxy and Nginx contributors.
“There’s a Disabled Vehicle in the HOV Lane…”
Performance engineering’s constraints, while perhaps daunting, are all quantifiable.
Like cybersecurity, performance engineering can be difficult. Unlike cyber, however, we are not facing unknown and evolving opponents; instead we have gauges (elapsed time, resource usage, etc.) and our constraints, while perhaps daunting, are all quantifiable.
Nevertheless, users rightfully expect near-instant response times, asynchronous and batched operations’ durations must not be unreasonable, and, in short, as a system’s inherent complexity and interconnects increase, opportunities for the metaphorical “disabled vehicle in the HOV lane” increase accordingly and work at best slows and at worst halts.
Left, Middle, and Right
Forge a suitable, manageable, and proactive testing program touching key points of the lifecycle.
Designing, testing, and verifying a system’s performance—whether for user response time requirements or architectural capacity considerations—must truly be an engineering effort, meaning subject to scientific rigor lest our efforts be invalid, wasted, and potentially detrimental.
Sector 7G brings decades of performance engineering expertise—from eliminating bottlenecks in live, critical, and overwhelmed systems to forging effective, repeatable, and manageable performance testing programs touching key points of development lifecycles.
Team leads and managers know the value of verifying performance early and often, but also face increased delivery pressure. We help teams strike balances by relying on established and proven performance engineering frameworks without unnecessary cost or frustration. We focus on developing and improving performance testing programs: early/left-shifted, midpoint checks, and pre-deploy/right-most, catering to objectives, constraints, and, of course, the distinct operational aspects and behaviors of the system.
Testing Essentials
Every system presents myriad dynamics affecting its performance and thus attempting a complete overview here would be futile. However, Performance Testing Essentials presents our testing rigors’ foundation distilled to a brief, six-point guide to an effective program (and not waiting for the tow truck…).
Engage Sector 7G and visit our Learning Center’s Performance Engineering area to learn more.