Release It!, 2nd Edition

Taking the Pulse

When we arrived on Wednesday night, I immediately set up my laptop in my parents’ home office. I can work anywhere I have broadband and a cell phone. Using their 3 MB cable broadband, I used PuTTY to log into our jumphost and start up my sampling scripts.

During the run-up to the launch, I was part of load testing this new site. Most load tests deliver results after the test is done. Since the data come from the load generators rather than inside the systems under test, it is a “black-box” test. To get more information out of the load test, I had started off using the application server’s HTML administration GUI to check vitals like latency, free heap memory, active request-handling threads, and active sessions.

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