We’ve been using blitz.io to optimize the backend server of a location-aware iPhone app (customer) that’s going to be released soon and we learned some interesting things that I thought I’ll pass on. The first key observation really is that performance optimization is a continuous, iterative and agile process. This means that the tools you use to validate performance have to be painless and friendly so you spend more time on tuning your code instead of figuring out how to run the tests. RESTful backends for iPhone and Android apps are exploding. I think we are past the era of simple utility apps like Sudoku and Chess, but instead the social element is now connecting these apps to backend RESTful servers that are expected to scale to the extreme, given the sheer number of mobile devices there are.
Archive for Scale
Attacks @ Scale
Last month we added a new space on TestCloud with thousands of known attacks as .msl templates. Some of you may recall that the secret behind the speed of test creation with Mu is in the way we can take in a wide variety of formats including .pcap, .har, curl to name a few and convert it into MuSL. So what we did was we took another look at our known attack templates and made that available as .msl templates.
Mu Studio Scale Video Posted
Over at the Mu Training Site, we recently published our Introduction to Mu Studio Scale video.
In the video, we used an easy to understand Scenario and ramped it up to 100,000 concurrent users. Actually,though, I think we replicated a lot more than 100,000 users, and here is why.
Release 5.7.0 – Multiple Scale Players and LTE smarts
Our first release of the year brings two very useful capabilities to users – Multiple Scale Players and LTE smarts.
More scale and smarter scale for a wider set of real applications seems to be the emerging trend in the market. It’s no longer just about protocol support or raw throughput numbers. Unpredictable demand of applications post-launch is becoming the main challenge and our customers are demanding ways to replicate this in the test lab.
Why you should get a 66% refund on your firewall!
This was both funny and sad at the same time. Since the time I built the IDP back at OneSecure, I have seen a number of situations where a networking product (firewall, DPI, IPS, extrusion detection, yada, yada) mirrors the marketing literature in terms of capacity, sessions, flows, etc and yet are completely overwhelmed in the real-world. We recently got to play with a firewall that was supposedly capable of 400,000 flows.
Optimizing node.js/CouchDB apps with Studio Scale Test
As most of you probably know, the Slashdot Effect is caused by someone posting a link to Slashdot which triggers massive amounts of inbound requests that melts the web server. These days it could be Twitter, Reddit, HN, etc. To quote the Wikipedia:
Few definitive numbers exist regarding the precise magnitude of the Slashdot effect, but estimates put the peak of the mass influx of page requests at anywhere from several hundred to several thousand hits per minute.
This short video shows you how to create the Slashdot Effect using Studio Scale.
MuSL – Interactive Application Protocol Fuzzing Playground
MuSL stands for Mu Scenario Language, a canonical canonical Domain Specific Language that we use in Mu Studio to represent complex transactions between multiple hosts using multiple transports and layers. The language itself borrows constructs from numerous languages and was designed to be protocol friendly. We just published an interactive application protocol playground that shows off MuSL and how to use it for various types of testing including LTE, NoSQL, Databases, Layer2 and DPI.
Scale Testing Outlook Web Access with Mu Studio
If you are building or deploying a WAN Acceleration or DPI product, chances are you will be dealing with Outlook Web Access (OWA) users from branch offices trying to get their mail working. You have to undoubtedly worry about scaling your products (and Exchange!) as your branch office gets larger with more and more people accessing this. As shown below, OWA is not just for the browser. You can have the Outlook client use the RESTful API over SSL without resorting or DCERPC firewall tunneling madness.
MuSL for Application Protocol Fuzzing and Scale Testing – Introduction
So we’ve had this thing called MuSL (Mu Scenario Language) for more than a year now in the Mu Studio product. It’s the format of choice at Mu for modeling everything from layer 2 through 7 across a wide range of applications, everything from LTE (Long Term Evolution), Databases, SCADA, Web applications, NoSQL to FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet). Our customers use this for Functional Testing, Fuzzing and most recently Scale Testing. This is the first of a series of blogs describing what MuSL is and how you can use a single description of a multi-host, multi-protocol, multi-transport transaction for Application Fuzzing to Scale Testing.
