ACM Queue – High-Performance Team – Does your development team have a high-performance mind-set?
If you want to keep producing high-performance software, you must be able to run reproducible, comparable performance tests. Ideally, you’ll have dedicated, standard hardware on which to run these tests; this should be representative of, if not directly comparable with, what your customers run in production. You’ll run a basic set of performance tests as part of your release cycle, plus more comprehensive benchmarks as required.So what should you test? What is important? You need to find a balance between the time it takes to run the tests and the information they actually give you. A large set of complex tests can tell you a huge amount about your application and even help you track down areas that have caused performance degradation, but that might be too time consuming to run for every release. Simpler tests that can run automatically in less than an hour would be better. Furthermore, your tests need to measure something using public interfaces that are stable between releases; otherwise, maintaining the tests will become an overhead.
Of course, the tests must exercise the operations and code paths that are important to your customers. They must measure the throughput of the common transactions or queries, based on the types of datasets and loadings seen on production systems. If practical, a captured production workload that can be rerun on demand would be ideal.
unmanageability 