Author: Corina Stratan

Performance testing for web applications: a quick guide

Posted by Corina Stratan on April 27, 2017

Today we use the web for almost everything. With continuously growing numbers of users for their web applications, developers face the issues of performance and scalability more than ever. This is also the case here at TOPdesk: while there used to be a small group of people developing performance tests, we now aim for the goal that each development team is able to write and run their own tests. To make it easier for teams who are new to this, we are collecting guidelines and documentation. Here is an introduction into performance testing with pointers for further reading.

Contents

  1. Which parts to test
  2. How to model the workload
  3. How much load to apply
  4. Where and when to run the tests

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Choosing a database connection pool

Posted by Corina Stratan on September 8, 2016

Some time ago we were looking for a database connection pool library to use at TOPdesk (here is a good introduction to connection pools if this term is new to you). There are many open-source connection pool libraries available, so we did not lack the choice. But with so many options it becomes difficult to choose most suitable one, which is why we decided to do a bit of research. Here are some of the things that we learned.

Our criteria

The first step was to decide which are the most important features we needed. Based on previous experience with our older connection pool (which was developed in-house) and on reading newer documentation, we settled on:

Reliability

Performance is always high on our wishlist, but one thing we find more important is reliability. We therefore planned to check the number of open bugs in the libraries that we were considering. Especially undesirable are deadlocks, a problem that some connection pools have when misconfigured. It actually happens quite often that connection pools are incorrectly or not optimally configured, and one of the causes is that some of them have unexpected default settings. We were therefore looking for a connection pool that is straightforward to configure and has reasonable default settings.

Performance

One thing to keep in mind is that the results of a performance test for connection pools are significantly influenced by how the pools are configured; and of course, the type of load used in a test might not be similar with the load that a real application will have in production. So, although we took into account the results of some performance tests that we found online (for example, this performance test) we also wanted to make sure that the connection pool that we choose will have a good performance in our own environment with our own configuration.

Functionality

For our application we needed a few specific features from the connection pool, such as support for Hibernate 4+ and being able to configure connection properties like the default type of transactions and the default isolation level. We also wanted to be able to configure when and how the connection health checks are done, in a way that is appropriate for the infrastructure and database server being used (our application supports both Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server).

Documentation & user community

Working with well documented libraries is easier, so we planned to check this aspect as well. We also prefer to use libraries with a larger user community, since they are usually better maintained.

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