F11-201: Real World Performance Testing in Production

Track: Performance Testing

Online application performance is critical – no one would challenge this statement. Yet the dirty little secret in the web world is that the amount of performance testing done on applications is appallingly low. When performance testing is done it’s usually conducted in a test lab. Even with thorough testing in a lab environment, when applications are deployed to production they very frequently topple under the pressure of real-word users. The results from this investment in lab testing are not delivering the answers that leadership needs about web application performance. Simply put, the lab is not the production environment. Running a few hundred virtual users in a small lab does not mean that you can support twenty times as much load in the production environment. Yet this kind of extrapolation is being done all throughout the industry.

Testing in production is an essential component of world-class performance methodologies. However, this approach is not without it’s own set of challenges; the three most common of which are security, test data in production, and potential live customer impact. In this session you’ll learn key elements from the methodology that companies are using to enable production testing and subsequently gain the highest confidence possible in their production application performance and reliability. How can you possibly place 10,000 test orders on an e-commerce site without having that many vacuum cleaners show up on your doorstep? How could you securely create 300,000 test accounts in production and leave them out there on a financial services application? Come to this session and learn how businesses from the New York Stock Exchange to Netflix have solved these problems to enable ongoing production testing.


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Session Speaker:

Dan BartowDan Bartow – Vice President, Product Management, SOASTA
Dan Bartow is VP of Product Management at SOASTA, the leader in performance testing from the cloud. Prior to joining SOASTA he was Sr. Engineering Manager at Intuit where his team was responsible for the performance and scalability of TurboTax Online, the #1 rated, best-selling online tax software. Over the past decade he has been responsible for the performance of websites for well-known brands including American Airlines, AT&T, Best Buy, Finish Line, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, and many more. Dan has set multiple industry precedents including deployment of the worlds largest stateful JBoss cluster and using over 2000 cloud computing cores to generate load against a live web site. Dan is a frequent industry presenter and has spoken at leading testing and cloud computing conferences.