Resource monitoring and graphing with Cacti in EC2

My colleague Jeff Roberts just posted a blog entry on 'Using Cacti to monitor a large scale infrastructure in Amazon’s EC2'. Highly recommended for people interested in monitoring and graphing their system resources across hundreds of nodes in Amazon EC2.

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Performance vs. load vs. stress testing

Here's a good interview question for a tester: how do you define performance/load/stress testing? Many times people use these terms interchangeably, but they have in fact quite different meanings. This post is a quick review of these concepts, based on my own experience, but also using definitions from testing literature -- in particular: "Testing computer software" by Kaner et al, "Software testing techniques" by Loveland et al, and "Testing applications on the Web" by Nguyen et al.

Update July 7th, 2005

From the referrer logs I see that this post comes up fairly often in Google searches. I'm updating it with a link to a later post I wrote called 'More on performance vs. load testing'.

Performance testing

The goal of performance testing is not to find bugs, but to eliminate bottlenecks and establish a baseline for future regression testing. To conduct performance testing is to engage in a carefully controlled process of measurement and analys…
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Generate TSIG keys

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-rw-------   1 root bind   122 2012-03-21 15:47 Kmyzone.com.+157+02058.key
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Image
Gatling is a modern load testing tool written in Scala. As part of the Jenkins setup I am in charge of, I wanted to run load tests using Gatling against a collection of pages for a given website. Here are my notes on how I managed to do this.

Running Gatling as a Docker container locally

There is a Docker image already available on DockerHub, so you can simply pull down the image locally:


$ docker pull denvazh/gatling:2.2.2
Instructions on how to run a container based on this image are available on GitHub:
$ docker run -it --rm -v /home/core/gatling/conf:/opt/gatling/conf \ -v /home/core/gatling/user-files:/opt/gatling/user-files \ -v /home/core/gatling/results:/opt/gatling/results \ denvazh/gatling:2.2.2
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