James Waldrop of Twitter discusses the tools, process and philosophy that goes into performance testing at Twitter. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Iago open source load testing library, which he wrote to enable Twitter’s engineering teams to perform load tests before deploying code to production.
This presentation dives into implementation details of some of these tests (including source code) and how complicating factors such as OAuth and arbitrary Thrift protocols are managed.

Video producer: https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation-conference/
Slides: http://goo.gl/9VY2b

Now that a lot of software applications are directly visible from customers and that a failure has broader consequences, load testing has gained an increase importance in the software testing domain. In this Phd thesis, Zhen Ming Jiang propose an approache for the automated and systematic analysis of load testing logs.

This article by Benjamin Day recommends to use custom counters when you perform load testing. It discusses how Visual Studio 2012 load-testing features call help you solve performance problems. The article describes how to set up Visual Studio to perform load testing, particularly the ability to capture Windows Performance Monitor Counters (PerfMon Counters).

Learn how Telerik Test Studio’s performance testing and just-released load testing features can help you detect bottlenecks in your system’s performance and answer business-critical questions about your ability to handle large amounts of traffic. This webinar focuses on Test Studio’s Performance and Load Testing features. It presents how these features can help you respond to questions from management like “Will our site be able to support traffic after this new product’s launch?” and “Are our customers happy when they are using our site during normal and high traffic times?”

This blog post discusses the load testing considered as a science and an art. It provides some interesting hints gathered from experience, such what it defines a golden rule of load testing “By the time the system is mature and stable enough to test, it’s time to deliver already”. It discusses also the fact that load tests are static, but the reality is not. Finally, how close you try to be to reality when you perform load testing, you will certainly not be able to replicate it completely.

This blog post provides guidelines for scalability testing. It defines the difference between load, performance and scalability testing. A well-designed workload is the first requirement for any performance testing is a well-designed workload. The post provides hints how to to plan, run and analyze scalability tests.

Continuous delivery is a software development strategy that optimizes the delivery process to get software delivered as quickly as possible. This blog by Eli Weinstock-Herman explains how to integrate the load testing stage in a continuous delivery process. It presents a detail step-by-step process on how to  incorporate the load testing scripts into the Jenkins open source continuous integration tool as a new build step in the delivery pipeline. This step will run the load test and capture the results.

Load testing is almost always conducted to address one or more risks related to expense, opportunity costs, continuity, and/or corporate reputation. In two blog posts, Tarun Arora discusses the topic. In part 1, he explains why Performance Testing the application is important, presents the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In part 2, he analyzes the details of web performance and load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application.

Silverlight is different from classic HTML web applications where the server does all of the processing. With Silverlight content is delivered without having to reload the page. The server constantly updates the application asynchronously. For this reason, IIS server loads reveal a very different profile. This article presents the new challenges in load testing Silverlight applications and provides three tips to improve Silverlight application perfor­mance.

This short tutorial presents a basic introduction to HP LoadRunner automated load testing tool. You will learn how to generate scripts with the Virtual User Generator, design and run a load test in the Controller and analyze the test results.