F10 – 304: Architecting Applications for Performance and Scalability

Track: Performance Testing

In this session, attendees will learn how to make architectural decisions for their online applications that set the stage for performance and scalability. Take a journey through the levels of a multi tier application, and learn how to be pro-active about building for performance, reliability and scalability. This covers everything from the underlying technology choices, the infrastructure, and the ongoing operations of measuring performance. The session will start by defining what performance and capacity truly mean. In general, customers decide whether performance is good or not. Amazon states that every 100ms of latency equals 1% profit loss, so a good customer experience is clearly paramount to generating sales. How about capacity? Do you define it in terms of visits per day, pages per hour, or concurrent users? Once that groundwork is laid, we will then discuss 3 categories of web sites in terms of traffic and size, how they define capacity, and talk about the technologies used for each (i.e., Facebook as a large traffic site with PHP as an underlying technology… and some of their challenges). Once the groundwork is laid, we will go into a head to head comparison of the most common languages and server side technologies with discussion about pro’s and con’s, and bringing in a wealth of experience from Dan’s time spent in the field with very large web sites. Then, we will step through each tier of an online application and point out the most common pinch points that hit companies as they begin to scale an online application (Load balancers, database connections, etc). Finally, we will discuss how to measure performance in a testing lab and in production, and how to have confidence that your application is ready for any unexpected traffic conditions. All of this followed by Q&A.


Download Presentation
Please Note: The presentations are intended for attendees only. The presentations page is password protected – contact info@softwaretestpro.com for verification of attendance and the password to access the presentation.


Session Speaker:

Dan BartowDan Bartow – Vice President and Cloud Evangelist, SOASTA
Dan Bartow is Vice President and CloudTest Evangelist at SOASTA, the leader in performance testing from the cloud. Prior to joining SOASTA he was Senior Manager of Performance Engineering at Intuit, where his team was responsible for the speed and stability of TurboTax Online, the #1 rated, best-selling online tax software. Over the past decade he has been responsible for the speed and scalability of websites for such well-known brands as American Eagle Outfitters, AT&T, Best Buy, Finish Line, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus and Sony Online Entertainment, among others. Dan has set multiple industry precedents including launching the worlds largest stateful JBoss cluster and using over 2000 cloud computing cores to generate load against a live web site. Dan has spoken at STPCon multiple times in the past with a nearly perfect 10 average feedback from attendees. Dan is a frequent industry presenter and has spoken at leading testing and cloud computing conferences such as Software Test & Performance (STP), O’Reilly’s Web2.0 Expo, and SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Expo.