Web Performance Matters

Performance Management (SLM) Challenges for Web 2.0, Ajax, and Rich Internet Applications (RIA's)

Last week, TechTarget published an article by Patrick Lightbody about the performance of Web 2.0 applications. The article's technical core -- which I review below -- is a useful checklist of ten recommendations for developing and testing Web 2.0 applications with performance in mind.

For the full article, see Ten ways to improve testing, performance of Web 2.0 applications.

Because I believe in systematic performance engineering, I am always pleased when writers advocate proactive approaches to application performance. It's the only rational way to ensure acceptable performance in production applications. So it's too bad that Patrick feels the need to justify his good advice by surrounding it with an introduction and conclusion that suffers from all the worst features of Web 2.0 coverage. A few half-truths are buried in an amalgam of excessive hype, false claims, meaningless analysis, and an optimism that underestimates the real technical challenges.

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Buying test tools is sometimes just like buying a new car: the salesman tells you that the car is reliable and has a great warranty; then the finance person warns of everything that could go wrong that isn't covered in the warranty and trys to sell you an extended warranty and maintenance contract.

Ben Simo, the author of the first paragraph, writes the blog Quality Frog. He is a software tester and test automation developer. His blog contains his "ramblings about software testing" and links to useful resources. In his post Performance Testing Lessons Learned, Ben shares his experiences with load testing and load testing tools.

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Your new Web application is almost ready to go live, but you need to be sure it will handle the projected traffic -- before that traffic hits the site. You probably already know that you can't just collect up your working test scripts and loop through them at high speed.

And just five minutes with Google should be enough to convince you that software performance testing is not a trivial matter.

So what should you do?

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What is performance testing? That seems like a silly question, doesn't it? I mean, we've all seen definitions for performance testing. We've conducted performance tests -- or been on projects where performance testing is conducted. But what is it really? And why is it that even when there seems to be obvious confusion about what performance testing is and is not, people seem hesitant to step back and ask What do you mean when you refer to performance testing?

I introduced the author of the paragraph above, Scott Barber, in my recent post here about Performance Engineering. The full article, What is Performance Testing?, contains some interesting observations.

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Jonathan Kohl, is a consultant, author, and speaker who specializes in software testing. His blog, Collaborative Software Testing, includes many discussions of frameworks, heuristics, and mnemonics that serve as guides for different aspects of testing.

In particular, a November 2006 post on Modeling Web Applications presented a 9-part framework for testing Web applications and the associated mnemonic, FP DICTUMM.

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Performance testing is the discipline concerned with determining and reporting the current performance of a software application under various parameters. But there comes a time after the tests are run when someone who's reviewing the results asks the deceptively simple question: So what, exactly, does all this mean? This point beyond performance testing is where the capabilities of the human brain come in handy.

With these words, Scott Barber introduced a series of articles on IBM's DeveloperWorks site about the human aspects of performance testing.

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