Don't Panic!
Listen to this article
Apparently, "after hours" batch jobs don't require load testing. Yes, you heard it. Supposedly jobs that run when no users are logged in are pretty much free to do whatever they like, all 57 of them! Is it some weird side effect of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that I've never heard of whereby it's possible to be either using the system interactively; or have limitless computing power; but not both at the same time? Who knows but excuse me for suggesting otherwise.
You'll also be relieved to learn that there is no need to load test your applications together on the same box even if they will be co-located in production because we can extrapolate from the results obtained by running a single application stand-alone. That'll be a good cost saving I'm sure.
Oh and as for including the generation and downloading of PDF documents, bah! That does nothing more than test all that pesky "network bandwidth stuff". There's nothing we can do about that anyway so why bother testing it right?
Phew! That's a load off my mind (no pun intended). I had thought that we might end up doubling the load on the production box but it seems I was somewhat misguided. Glad they've got it all sorted out. At less than 6 weeks 'till go live and with the application only just now limping into System Test, I was beginning to worry. Silly me. What was I thinking?
Now where did I put my double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses? I'm sure they're around here somewhere...
Comments
That sounds eerily like the setup we're running in our production environment. There are lots of pros to running multiple apps on the same box (we run I think at last count 10 different apps on seperate jvms on our production boxes) but ease of load testing certainly isn't one of them. Especially when they have different audiences and the load cycles are different (many are internal, business hours only with end of month spikes and some are consumer-facing with event driven spikes and more nightly load).
Posted by: Rob Meyer | November 4, 2004 03:45 PM
Hi Simon,
I think I know why you cannot find your sunnies... they're on your head but have already turned black so you cannot see any other place they might be located.
Still, all this load testing stuff sounds like SEP (which for some reason doesn't appear in the same glossary as the glasses, yet I'm sure it appears in the first book?)
Posted by: Andy | November 5, 2004 06:04 AM
The "Somebody Else's Problem" field was introduced in Book 3, "Life, The Universe, and Everything". It's first mentioned when Arthur and Ford are picked up Slartibartfast; it protects the spaceship "Bistromathic".
And the sad thing is the only thing I had to look up was the spelling of Slartibartfast's name (which, it turns out, I got right anyway).
You can find modern versions of a SEP field generator inside the stub of each and every cigarette butt you see on the street. How the tobacco industry can make them that cheap I just don't know.
Posted by: Robert Watkins | November 5, 2004 01:01 PM
On a more serious note: I'm not sure I'd bother load testing 59 apps in conjunction. But you can bet I'd monitor them in prod and ramp them on to the box over time so I know when I'm hitting the limit...
Posted by: Robert Watkins | November 5, 2004 01:03 PM