Tomorrow night, Wednesday 7/29/09, NedSpace is having a demo night to show off their new space. Come for the free drinks, stay to see us present.

So come on down to Hellzapoppin’ on Wednesday at 4. See the second NedSpace location on NW 5th in Old Town and see your peers show off their cool new projects.

It’s sure to be packed. And it’s sure to be chock full of awesome.

For more information, visit NedSpace. To RSVP for the event, see NedSpace Hellzapoppin on Upcoming. (via SiliconFlorist)

Please drop in and say hi to us.

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Yesterday in a press release New Relic announced our partnership.

“Our clients understand the critical impact that poor application performance has on end-user satisfaction and business success,” said Patrick Lightbody, CEO and founder of BrowserMob. “New Relic is the perfect partner for us. The combination of BrowserMob’s browser testing tools–the first of their kind– and New Relic’s monitoring and root-cause analysis capabilities will make it easier for our customers to optimize their web applications throughout the development lifecycle.”

We are very excited about his partnership since it will give our customers a more complete solution for load testing.

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It seems that Mozilla’s new release of FireFox 3.5 is a lot faster, but still a bit behind Google’s Chrome.

In our page-loading tests, Firefox 3.5 speeds past Internet Explorer and Safari, but it still can’t catch Google’s browser.

Google Chrome showed the fastest page load time in five of the eight sites we tested it against, with an average page loading time of 1.699 seconds. However, Firefox 3.5 also put on a strong showing, coming in a close second with an average page-loading time of 1.762 seconds. (via PC World)

Safari and IE were not too far behind, so it seems that Google has really forced the issue of JavaScript speed with the introduction of Chrome. This can only be good news for consumers, but it does imply that there will be a lot of work going into the competing browsers over the next few years.

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We’ve seen a few tests recently from Magento users, and now we know why. Joachim Houtman has written a great post on Magento perfomance tuning over on Yoast that ends with a nice little shoutout.

This article give a introduction how to improve your Magento site performance, none of these tips are revolutionary. Because every website’s scenario is different, when you really want to get the most out of your Magento install you need to hire a professional. The only way to discover the optimal server configuration is testing, a really great tool to use is BrowserMob, load testing with real web browsers so you will able to put even the Magento checkout process under load testing.

So we’d like to thank Joachim for the kind words and welcome members of the Magento community.

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Earlier today TechCrunch reported that Microsoft has released pricing and a time line for its cloud platform Azure. We have already been in talks with the Azure team and it is interesting to note that the platform seems to straddle the line between IaaS (Infrastrure as a Service) like EC2 and PaaS (Platform as a Service) like Google App Engine. Given this, Azure may be the perfect way for BrowserMob to add IE-based tests to our system.

As more cloud platforms get rolled out there are going to be an increasing number of ways for service providers to deliver innovative products to their customers. We are very excited about these developments and are looking forward to experimenting with them.

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Over at Web Performance there is a well written blog post about issues one must be careful of when doing load testing from Amazon’s cloud. The major issues that didn’t seem to have obvious fixes in the article were:

CPU Utilization

High CPU usage can cause timing delays in page durations, skew the distribution of users as the load is ramped up, and slow down page processing (particularly extractors using regular expressions).

Bandwidth

Amazon and other cloud-computing services either do not guarantee a level of bandwidth, or guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth rather than a level.

Both of these problems are basically different forms of resource
starvation, which can certainly be a concern in a virtualized, shared,
cloud environment. In many ways, it’s no different than the concern
one would have about running any software on a virtualized layer that
might be potentially shared for other uses.

Given that there is going to be some amount of “known unknown”
variability when running load tests from the cloud, the way to solve
these issues is to work within an environment that lets you react to
the variables as they arrive. You can usually avoid the problem
entirely by provisioning more resources than you need.

For example, in BrowserMob we generally only allocate 1 CPU core and
1GB of RAM per web browser. This is of course far more than you need
to drive a browser and our CPU utilization logs show it: we typically
use no more than 5-10% of our CPU capacity. We also tend to rent out
the largest EC2 instance types (High CPU Extra Large), which gives a
much higher probability that no one else will be using the physical
bare metal.

For our Virtual User service (which is closer to what everyone else
does), we never use more than 50 VUs per CPU core. Compare that to
most commercial and open source alternatives, which encourage you to
run 500+ concurrent VUs on your computers. We can afford to use so
many resources because our expenses are only active during the test,
so overall they remain very low.

But beyond simply over-allocating resources, there can still be
outside facts that can cause resource starvation. For example,
bandwidth could decrease in a certain EC2 availability zone, or a VM’s
CPU could be starved by a different EC2 customer. That’s why we spent
a lot of time building out automated “health checks” for all of our
load testing agents. We use the data from these checks to
automatically spin up more resources as needed, potentially in other
regions that may not be suffering the resource starvation.

We think the cloud is a great place to run load tests from, but it
really requires an approach that was built from the ground up to work
with cloud environments. Traditional commercial or open source tools
simply weren’t designed to monitor cloud health and respond on-the-fly
with the appropriate actions. However, if your tool is built to do
this, you’ll find cloud-based testing is a fantastic new way to
reliably test complex websites without breaking the bank!

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TechCrunch is talking about how Google is redefining the operating system.

So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS. And applications developers will develop for it just as they would on the web. This is similar to the approach Palm has taken with its new webOS for the Palm Pre, but Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS. (Via TechCrunch)

We can see a future when tools for testing web applications become the same tools for testing most applications.

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An interesting article over at Belfast Telegraph about how Michael Jackson’s death brought down several sites including Google News. One thing that should be noted is that even sites that didn’t have news were affected.

Some of the sites that continued to function experienced sluggish performance because of the way they were built. For example, some slowed down because they needed to fetch third-party content, such as advertisements, before serving up the page to the reader.

Ironic that it would be somthing like this and not an outbreak of war that would truely test the net’s infrastructure.

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Last week Patrick represented BrowserMob at Portland’s CloudCamp un-convention. Here is a partial, but very good, writup of what was discussed. With so much happening with companies and cloud services these types of events are a great way to get up the learning curve.

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