Performance Engineering

I have recounted some of my ACS experiences in my earlier post.

Few lessons learnt:
Performance Testing is not a check-box item
Performance engineers are important because, they can understand the language of administrators --connect the dots between o/s, app server, db admins etc who mostly operate in silos

ACS Experiences

I came to ACS for a performance testing/engineering project using a tool that I have never used called Rational Performance Tester (RPT). It turns out that the tool is not really flexible as Loadrunner. In my perspective, a tool used for measurement of anything should be SIMPLE and do the job.

It has been a learning experience for me so far. I have learnt the tool called RPT. I had a hands-on with some of the basic performance engineering techniques:

AIX Shell scripting primarily using AWK to parse through the access logs
(access logs/vmstat/iostat using AWK and visualize them using R..more work to be done on R)
JAVA thread dump analysis (Practice looking at multiple thread dumps, try creating multiple types of thread locks)
JAVA GC Analysis (practice looking at multiple types of JVM's)
Understanding of CPU allocation across LPARS (Learn about micro-partitioning,hypervisor and server architectures)
System analysis

I can see there are lot of things I can learnt in the topics mentioned above..I hope to get the right opp

RPT has been a dampener but, we have achieved a steady state in this project after lot of long hours,few findings and recommendations. Performance engineering is interesting and there's scope for learning...It's to be noted that this was a great opportunity to learn compared to the days at Aetna where the scope was very limited.


I want to use this project as a stepping stone to delve in to performance engineering

Bottomline:This project exposed and spurred the interest in Performance Engineering at various layers--Operating systerm,application and the hardware configuration
Be determined on the basic Performance Testing Techniques
-Workload mix-->Choose only business critical transactions that has 80% of the traffic
-Choose environment close to production
-Performance test should not be considered as a check-box item always run a test with measure->detect->fix->measure


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I have jotted down some of the issues faced

On top of managing a team which considers performance test as a check-box item, ACS NH performance project had the following issues
· Sheer number of workflows defined was 78 with terminologies such as variations and cycles
· Over 70 scripts were created with no transaction names and they had to be rendered useless, this was reduced to 5 scripts after battles
· RPT license issues had to be figured out
· Issues with handling of data by the 106 box
· RPT needed a patch for it to handle the new release
· Hyades error surfaced intermittently
· Issues with response time due to the machine
· Issues with running a schedule due to a patch in RPT resulting in a red-herring
· Rescripting after every release

Conditioning of the mind

Conditioning of the mind trains the brain in to false sense of happiness, you are actually manipulating yourself. You become a kind of person who doesn't know anything but to be nice,nasty,stubborn or a victim.

Steps to detoxify:
Take responsibility
Witness your feelings
Label your feelings
Express what you feel
Share what you feel
Release the toxic feeling
Celebrate through a ritual

On Self-Esteem:
Do not wish to be anything but who you are,
and try to be that perfectly

Cloud

Faith

Faith is good because,it combats fear of the unknown