Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...apart from a stiff drink...

...is a low cost web application performance testing tool that understands that a single page may include images, and will allow me to build tests that calculate overall page performance instead of having to look at every single GIF... and that allows me to randomise think times for pages rather than every single downloadable element...

Microsoft's free WAS tool is good, but it's not quite right for the job at hand... I'm having to get into the underlying Access databases to get things working the way I want.

Grrr. Stress testing this application is stressing me...

Still, it looks like our team's database guru has found a hidden Oracle setting that seems to make things perform a lot better.

37.5 %

My weblog owns 37.5 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

Oh dear. Personally I blame tamaranth. That is if I completely ignore the articles on blog software development I wrote at least a year ago. For one thing, LJ is an awful lot better at blogging than Microsoft Access!

Thinking more about my earlier problem, a web search has thrown up this rather useful resource: The Software QA/Test Resource Centre.

Looking through their list I may also have identified OpenSTA as a possible solution to my stress testing problems. Looking at the documentation, it's an open source spinout from the heavy duty Cyrano testing tool... and it seems to support script iteration tests rather than the timeboxing model of other tools that I've looked at.

Now to see if it works...

The Semagic LJ client (ljwin32_sema) has just had a major update. It's looking good, and now has added menu bars and macro support. Look here for details.