Is your Web service production-ready? Frank Cohen has written a comprehensive introduction into performance testing of SOAP-based applications. This article presents an example with Apache SOAP and Java and the test scripts shown are built in a free open-source utility, Load.This utility is available at the Open source zone on IBM developerWorks and on Frank's company site (PushToTest). Load is available to write test automation suites for performance and scalability testing of SOAP-based Web services. It offers a scripting language to operate a library of test objects, and enables you to develop intelligent scripts that drive a Web service. Multiple concurrent running copies of the script show whether the Web service performs under simulated production situations. You will find the links in the article here (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-testsoap/).

Who reads the Software Licensing Agreements when installing new software? Not many people. But Stuart Moncrieff takes a look at the details in his LoadRunner Licensing Agreement and finds some interesting tidbits that might surprise you. You can read his blog entry here (http://www.myloadtest.com/loadrunner-licensing-agreement/).

Robert Gast writes about the need for Load testing and points to the necessity of realism in your loads. You can find the article here (http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs102505-story03.html).

In a previous blog entry, I mentioned that some large and respected vendors were experiencing significant performance and stability problem in the weeks running up to Christmas. Now Tom Kruegler has written a nice article on MarketingProfs.com called: "The Billion-Dollar Question: The Impact of Web Site Performance on E-Commerce (http://www.marketingprofs.com/5/kuegler1.asp)". In this article he calculates the costs of lacklustre performance and stability and introduces the concept of "soft" performance issues. It is a worthwhile read that you could really pass on to management as it talks their language.

In the weeks running up to Christmas many Internet retailers are finding out the hard way how popular Internet shopping has become. With some recent outages and slow downs at Amazon.com and Kmart.com and L.L. Bean's site, it is becoming clear that significant losses will be incurred if your website is not ironclad. I am being jolly because these are the juicy stories that you can slap on your client's (or manager's) desk as a justification for your existence. CNN has a nice little article (http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/13/technology/holiday_glitches/?cnn=yes) about this called "How the glitch stole Christmas?". One of the comments in the article says: "advice is for retailers to do a lot more load testing". That's just the Christmas wish I wanted. Happy Holidays all!

Two interesting articles on AnandTech about performance comparisons. I am not so interested in what the actually found, but I am very interested in the way the went about trying to find the causes of the performance differences.It depicts a very common process for performance testers. From the site:A little bit more than a month ago, AnandTech published "No more mysteries: Apple's G5 versus x86, Mac OS X versus Linux" with the ambitious goal of finding out how the Apple platform compares, performance-wise, to the x86 PC platform. The objective was to find out how much faster or slower the Apple machines were compared to their PC alternatives in a variety of server and workstation applications. Now they have followed up with part 2.

(MP3, 19 MB, 20:31) Keith Moon is talking about performance and load testing at QA PodCast. Keith's day job is at a large Vancouver software company that builds business intelligence software. Here are some quotes from today's show: "I would think being a performance tester would be a very exciting job. Because, as you say, it requires a understanding of the system, architectural thinking, a sharp detective mind to understand where the bottlenecks come from." "There's this game called Mastermind which is basically a troubleshooting game. That's what testing is like, except for this is on a grander scale, when you have a complex, interdependent system. The most fun is when the product comes together and you can start taking it to the upper extremities of load and start to monitor how the whole ecosystem works together." "The weakest link is what determines the performance of the system, and there's loads of opportunities for weakest links to slip through until you do the full system test."

As I am quite busy lately with testing Web Services, I found this article by Bernie Domanski, Ph.D. in z/Journal Review a great introduction into Web Services and the common performance issues that will pop up in your implementation.You can read the article here (http://zjournal.com/PDF/domanski.pdf). (PDF File)