The performance of your application affects your business more than you might think. Top engineering organizations think of performance not as a nice-to-have, but as a crucial feature of their product. Those organizations understand that performance has a direct impact on user experience and, ultimately, their bottom line. Unfortunately, most engineering teams do not regularly test the performance and scalability of their infrastructure. Dustin Whittle shares the latest performance testing tools and insights into why your team should add performance testing to the development process. Learn how to evaluate performance and scalability on the server-side and the client-side with tools like Siege, Bees with Machine Guns, Google PageSpeed, WBench, and more. Take back an understanding of how to automate performance and load testing and evaluate the impact it has on performance and your business.

1. Performance Tes-ng
Crash Course
Dus$n Whi*le

2. Dus-n Whi5le
• dus-nwhi5le.com
• @dus-nwhi5le
• San Francisco, California, USA
• Technologist, Traveler, Pilot, Skier, Diver, Sailor, Golfer

3. Why does performance ma5er?

5. Performance directly impacts
the bo5om line

7. How fast is fast enough?
§ Performance is key to a great user experience
- Under 100ms is perceived as reac$ng instantaneously
- A 100ms to 300ms delay is percep$ble
- 1 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay
uninterrupted
- Users expect a site to load in 2 seconds
- AMer 3 seconds, 40% will abandon your site.
- 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's a*en$on
§ Modern applica-ons spend more -me in the browser than on the server-side

8. Treat performance as a feature!

9. Tools of the trade for
performance tes-ng

10. Understand your
baseline performance

11. Sta-c
vs
Hello World
vs
Applica-ons

12. Apache Bench

13. ab -c 1 -t 10 -k
http://acmedemoapp.com/

14. Benchmarking acmedemoapp.com (be patient)
Finished 187 requests
Server Software: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Server Hostname: acmedemoapp.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 5217 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 10.039 seconds
Complete requests: 187
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 187
Total transferred: 1021768 bytes
HTML transferred: 975579 bytes
Requests per second: 18.63 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 53.687 [ms] (mean)

15. ab -c 10 -t 10 -k
http://acmedemoapp.com/

16. Benchmarking acmedemoapp.com (be patient)
Finished 659 requests
Server Software: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Server Hostname: acmedemoapp.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 5217 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 10.015 seconds
Complete requests: 659
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 659
Total transferred: 3600776 bytes
HTML transferred: 3438003 bytes
Requests per second: 65.80 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 151.970 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 15.197 [ms] (mean, across all

17. Siege

18. siege -c 10 -b -t 10S http://acmedemoapp.com/

19. ** SIEGE 3.0.6
** Preparing 10 concurrent users for
battle.
The server is now under siege...
Lifting the server siege... done.
Transactions: 623 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 9.57 secs
Data transferred: 3.10 MB
Response time: 0.15 secs
Transaction rate: 65.10 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.32 MB/sec
Concurrency: 9.91
Successful transactions: 623
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 0.30
Shortest transaction: 0.10

20. What about when you need
more than one machine?

21. Bees with Machine
Guns

22. A utility for arming (creating)
many bees (micro EC2 instances)
to attack (load test)
targets (web applications)

23. pip install
beeswithmachineguns

24. # ~/.boto
[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id=xxx
aws_secret_access_key=xxx
[Boto]
ec2_region_name = us-west-2
ec2_region_endpoint = ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

25. bees up -s 2 -g default -z us-west-2b -i
ami-bc05898c -k appdynamics-
dustinwhittle-aws-us-west-2 -l ec2-user

26. Connecting to the hive.
Attempting to call up 2 bees.
Waiting for bees to load their machine guns...
.
.
.
.
Bee i-3828400c is ready for the attack.
Bee i-3928400d is ready for the attack.
The swarm has assembled 2 bees.

27. bees attack -n 1000 -c 50 -u
http://acmedemoapp.com/

28. Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 500 rounds, 25 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
Organizing the swarm.
…
Offensive complete.
Complete requests: 1000
Requests per second: 306.540000 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 163.112000 [ms] (mean)
50% response time: 151.000000 [ms] (mean)
90% response time: 192.000000 [ms] (mean)
Mission Assessment: Target crushed bee offensive.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.

29. bees attack -n 100000 -c 1000 -u
http://acmedemoapp.com/

30. Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 50000 rounds, 500 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
Organizing the swarm.
…
Offensive complete.
Complete requests: 100000
Requests per second: 502.420000 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 360.114000 [ms] (mean)
50% response time: 451.000000 [ms] (mean)
90% response time: 402.000000 [ms] (mean)
Mission Assessment: Target crushed bee offensive.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.

31. Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 50000 rounds, 500 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
Organizing the swarm.
Bee 0 is joining the swarm.
Bee 1 is joining the swarm.
Bee 0 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 0 lost sight of the target (connection timed out).
Bee 1 lost sight of the target (connection timed out).
Offensive complete.
Target timed out without fully responding to 2 bees.
No bees completed the mission. Apparently your bees are
peace-loving hippies.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.

32. bees down

33. Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Calling off the swarm.
Stood down 2 bees.

34. locust.io
https://github.com/locustio/locust

35. pip install locustio

39. There are many tools…
•Gatling.io
•Wrk
•Vegeta
•Tsung
•…

40. In modern web applications more
latency comes from the client-side
than the server-side.

45. npm install psi

47. WBench

48. gem install wbench

49. wbench
h5p://dus-nwhi5le.com/

51. Automate client-side
performance tes-ng with
Grunt/Gulp

52. How many people understand exactly
how fast their site runs in produc-on?

53. Instrument everything = code, databases,
caches, queues, third party services, and
infrastructure.

55. Track performance in
development and produc-on

56. webpagetest.org

60. SiteSpeed.io

70. Load tes-ng services
from the cloud

74. Test for failures
• NetFlix Simian Army + Chaos Monkey
• What happens if you lose a caching layer?
• What happens if dependencies slow down?

75. Best Prac$ces
• Treat performance as a feature
• Capacity plan and load test the server-side
• Op-mize and performance test the client-side
• Understand your star-ng point
• Instrument everything
• Monitor performance in development and produc-on
• Measure the difference of every change
• Automate performance tes-ng in your build and deployment process
• Understand how failures impact performance

76. The protocols are evolving
• The limita$ons of HTTP/1.X forced us to develop various applica$on
workarounds (sharding, concatena$on, spri$ng, inlining, etc.) to op$mize
performance. However, in the process we’ve also introduced numerous
regressions: poor caching, unnecessary downloads, delayed execu$on, and
more.
• HTTP/2 eliminates the need for these hacks and allows us to both simplify our
applica$ons and deliver improved performance.
• You should unshard, unconcat, and unsprite your assets
• You should switch from inlining to server push
• Read Ilya Grigorik awesome book on browser performance - h*p://hpbn.co/
h*p2

77. Integrate automated performance tes-ng
into con-nuous integra-on for server-side
and client-side

78. Understand the performance implica-ons
of every deployment and package upgrade

79. Monitor end user experience
from end to end in produc-on

80. Ques-ons?

81. Find these slides on SpeakerDeck
h5ps://speakerdeck.com/dus-nwhi5le

82. http://www.appdynamics.com/