úterý 26. listopadu 2013

PerfCake on LinuxAlt 2013

We are out and we are getting known!

You had the first opportunity to see a public demonstration of the basic features of our young and growing performance testing framework. Martin Večeřa and Jiří Sedláček performed the talk at the open-source software conference LinuxAlt 2013 held on the grounds of Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic on November 2nd, 2013.

Martin Večeřa mentioned our motivation to work in the performance testing area and the issues that can emerge in a process of the performance testing. Issues that PerfCake is trying to solve such as how to measure the performance, how to ensure the reliability of the measured metrics and what to take into account. Martin than briefly introduced the PerfCake architecture and the possibility to extend all the features PerfCake has.

Jiří Sedláček followed with the demonstration of a basic performance measurement done with PerfCake. Jiří showed how to get and install PerfCake and how to define and run a simple scenario to easily test performance of several HTTP endpoints including the reporting abilities.

Soon the record of the talk and the demonstration will be available online. The talk and the demonstration was performed in Czech but the English subtitles/transcript will be available soon as well.

We were excited to see how many people came to learn something about PerfCake. We would like to thank all the attendees especially for asking curious questions. It encouraged us to work even harder to achieve our goals such as to become the best tool on the market. It was all fun for us and we look forward to another opportunities to present PerfCake and to meet you, our growing community.

The upcoming release awaits your contributions!


neděle 29. září 2013

Release One

So here we are. Our first release is out. For us, this was the first grown-up money-less open-source project we pushed so far. You know, sometimes you have a great idea but the lust goes away too soon. I do not know what makes PerfCake so different that it worked out. But I am really glad we made it. We learnt a lot, everybody played every role at least for a while (as there are more roles than available actors). And here we are!

Did we manage to achieve everything we wanted? Definitely not. Release 1.0 is not perfect. But we tried hard and we are almost there. The documentation needs more time to settle down, validation must be re-done, there is a design flaw in reporting the 100% status message for time based message generation... Are these just the details or major issues? This is what the users must tell us now.

At this point, I would like to thank to everybody who helped on the project. Not only developers and contributors, but those who reported or just found bugs, sent pull requests, provided their technical advice, motivated us to go on... Thank you very much!

Now, this is not the end. This is just the beginning and we must refresh our minds and head towards the second release, the Spring Edition!

Let's spend the winter writing some good piece of code. Onwards!

úterý 23. července 2013

Welcome to PerfCake

Today I received a printed copy of a new book published at Pack - JBoss AS 7 Development. I did a review of the book (I appologize to Francesco Marchioni for being such a bas*ard) so they gave me a small paragraph in the credits. How does that relate to PerfCake? There is a hardly noticeable marketing of PerfCake. Well, to be honest, it says that I publish articles on the PerfCake blog. So I guess it is the right time to start now ;-)

So what is PerfCake? As you can see on its home page - PerfCake is a lightweight performance testing tool and a load generator with the aim to be minimalistic, easy to use, provide stable results, have minimum influence on the measured system, be platform independent, use component design, allow high troughput. There is also a more detailed description...

So what really is PerfCake? Ok, did you play with some nice building kit® as a kid? We did! And we liked it so much that we wanted exactly the same kit for performance testing. For us to be able to independently specify what, how and when should be tested. Once we might want to compose a castle, the other time a space ship, and yet we can reuse the basic blocks. Why did not we choose any existing tool? There is a separate blog post on this topic coming soon. But the long story short - we wanted exactly the attributes mentioned in the previous paragraph. And we did not succeed in our quest for such a tool. So we helped ourselves and developed it. After several years of testing performance of various Java Middleware products we realized that our tool is really advanced and production ready. So let's open source it!

Whoa, young boys! We wanted to provide you something really cool. And we only had just the tool that did its job right, had all the attributes, but was only for brave knight riders. Over the nights, while our families were sleeping, we did a major rework of each of the part. Actually, this is still undergoing, but we are almost there.

Our main goal for this summer is to release the version 1.0. This includes a complete web site (all downloads working), complete documentation, the source code we can be proud of, high test coverage (all interface contract conditions must be tested for example), and a couple of success stories on this blog.

We would like to encourage you to give us some feedback on what you are missing in your favorite performance testing tool, to even become a member of our community, or to send us a bug report. And we would be happy to help you use PerfCake in your environment, for you to be able to provide us a success story.

Feel free to try to reach us by any of the means mentioned on the community page.