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'.

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Image
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