Patrick Killelea

A hefty tome packed with useful stuff for tuning your application. Second part more hit and miss covering the whole range of web technology. Much real world techniques and philosophy. Not hugely useful if you are a Microsoft centred webmaster.

The book is in two parts. Load testing of websites takes up virtually all of the first. The second is concerned with improving the performance of the wider web and internet environments.

Load testing is detailed in depth by Mr Killelea. Topics include various tools and techniques available to the tester. Much space is given to various open source tools and techniques. Testing of Unix and Linux websites is covered comprehensively.

A huge range of resources, tools and techniques are described in easy reading detail.

Two areas are less comprehensive. Microsoft technology based websites are barely covered. The .Net framework does not get a look in. The other area glossed over is the use of commercial tools such as LoadRunner. These are dismissed out of hand in a few scant paragraphs

As the majority of sites and ISPs are still hosted on Apache, this should not be too much of a problem. For a more MS centred focus, look at Performance Testing .Net Web Applications – Microsoft ACE Team.

The second part of the book concerns speeding up the web in general. Every aspect of hardware and good practices is touched upon. Servers, connections, considerations about Java, databases and security are all subjects covered by Mr Killea. The level of detail seems about right. (A full

Web www.performancetest.force9.co.uk

Testing Performance Bestsellers
The bestselling books on Amazon.

Articles

Load Testing

performance testing

Test Tools

Web Performance Tuning

Tool Mentor