Amol Khanapurkar

Performance Testing: Far from Steady State

The dot com era ushered in a number of industry standard load testing tools. While there is no doubt that these tools have helped improve the quality of IT systems, performance testing in the IT industry is far from steady state. There are still severe gaps between performance test results and production systems performance in IT projects. This paper proposes a number of areas where performance testing needs to improve radically, several of which can be incorporated in to load testing tools. Examples are also provided of simple analytics during single user performance testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this extra but necessary step in the testing process.

High performance image storage-retrieval architecture

Enterprises today need to manage their content/ documents more efficiently than in the past. Even across different domains the complexity of managing millions of documents is huge. One such case was when our company was invited to submit a proposal for a central bank of a large country for its Cheque Truncation system. This would help the central bank reduce the turn-around time for clearing cheques at the same time save costs in physically transporting, storing and processing these cheques. Our company evaluated two well known approaches by doing Proof of Concept exercises on two architectures which were identified to be proposed to the bank. During the evaluation, strengths and weaknesses of both architectures were quantified on different parameters to identify a more suitable architecture. However both architectures were found to be unsuitable to meet the non-functional requirements of this bank, primarily Performance, Scalability and Reliability. Hence we began studying the problem of storing and retrieving images from a system where millions of images are added per day, with an aim of getting superior performance, scalability and high reliability. This paper describes the two architectures that were evaluated and adduces benchmark numbers to prove their unsuitability against the given requirements. Next it describes a set of experiments that were performed. Based on experimental findings a new architecture was developed. This architecture is capable of delivering extremely high-performance, high-scalability and high-reliability. This architecture is what is described and labeled as High-Performance ImageStore Solution in this paper.

DCPE Rollout: Scaling Performance Engineering Training and Certification across a Very Large Enterprise

Performance engineering is a badly needed skill for implementing and running IT systems, but performance engineers are hard to find in the market. This paper presents our experiences in rolling out training and certification in a first level course on performance engineering across a large enterprise. We present data and lessons learned on the nominations for the rollout, the design and analysis of theory and practical exams, and the methods used to ensure fairness in a rollout spanning hundreds of nominations. We present results that show trainees to perform exceeding well much against conventional wisdom, and we also show how the success of the rollout has led to a number of beneficial initiatives for the company.