8 Comments

  1. Ryan Doherty   •  

    Awesome! I must say your presentation was one of the best at Velocity. Much more practical and useful than any of the ‘cloud’ presentations.

  2. Bryan E   •  

    I agree. I found your presentation to be very useful. I am trying to define/capture/consolidate all of the metrics for my sites and make them “digestable” to others. You gave me a lot of good ideas to work with.

  3. mramos   •  

    Your presentation at Velocity was great, and you’ve talked about many of the problems that cross my work regarding Capacity Planning. Realy, really great. Can’t wait for the book.

    And talking about capacity planning, two days ago Theo Schlossnagle posted about Reconnoiter (http://lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/121-Reconnoiter-and-another-platform.html).

    This tool can be really helpful in capacity planning. As Theo says “trending is much more than drawing graphs… it is about intelligent data correlation, regression analysis/curve fitting”. Let’s wait for the first version 🙂

  4. Brian B   •  

    A little late to the party, but I’m in agreement with the other comments here – your presentation at the Velocity Conf was great. Very useful information and one of the reasons I’ll be attending the ’09 Web Ops show.

    You mention some great tools for monitoring what’s happening in your environment, but I have a slightly different question – what tools would you recommend for stress testing?

    I have an opportunity (due to our marketing team releasing a popular promotion) to do some stress / load testing against our production environment. I actually get to break our application to see what those breaking points are.

    I imagine that given the Flickr user base, you essentially have ‘built-in’ load testing, but can you recommend 1 or 2 (or 10) tools for load / stress testing? I’ve used Mercury in the past and I’ve been talking to Keynote and Gomez, but I’d like to see if there isn’t a less expensive option available…

    Thanks!

  5. allspaw   •     Author

    Hey Brain – I appreciate the kind words!

    Of course I’ll say that nothing will be as good as production load, but 2 decent tools come to mind:

    Seige: http://joedog.org
    httperf: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/

    they both allow you to re-play logs gathered from production, and have lots of knobs and levers to raise/lower/change how you throw traffic at your servers.

    Keynote and Gomez are gonna give you something these tools won’t be able to, though: they’ll be able to tell you how much internet latency affects your load from all over the planet.

  6. Brian B   •  

    Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll take a look at the tools you mentioned.

    Good point about the Gomez and Keynote tools. That is one feature that is worthwhile to me, as only about 30-40% of our traffic is U.S. based…

    Thanks again!

  7. Zack   •  

    Awesome! I have the audio and now I can see the slides too!

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