Explaining why you should and how you can test your web application using JMeter test plans to determine the scalability. By knowing how good or bad your application performs you can then make the decision to optimize it. But where to start optimizing? => You need to profile your application in order to see the components which have the most impact in your application regarding number of method calls, memory consumption and CPU time used. XHProf is a good hierarchical profiler which you can use to generate the callstack and a callgraph of your application (directed acyclic weighted graph) to see where you could start optimizing your application. This talk was presented on the TYPO3 DevDays 2015 in Nuremberg.

2. Load testing and
performance tracing

3. My Name is Hans Höchtl
Technical director @ Onedrop Solutions
PHP, Java, Ruby Developer
Participation in TYPO3 Solr

4. Load testing
Determining the maximum
operating capacity of an
application.

5. Why?
- Properly scale your system
- Analyze QoS performance
- Identify bottlenecks
- Check reliability
- Verify SLA

6. How?
- Have a lot of friends
- Have a lot of employees
- Pay people
- Use proper software solution

7. Apache JMeter
- Open source java tool (therefore platform
idependent)
- Can analyze any kind of web application (or native
software)
- Easy configurable tests and graphs
- Supports external data sources for serving test data
- Scales

8. Let’s look into test plans

9. JMeter master-slave
- Uses RMI
- Use the same network subnet or a
proxy
- Use SSH portforwarding
- If you configure live results, network
bandwidth will be heavy

10. Blazemeter
- SaaS solution to run JMeter tests at scale
- Can use AWS, Google Cloud, your own
machines (reduces configuration
overhead for RMI)
- Integrates with CI tools => measure
performance increase/decrease before a
release

11. Blazemeter
- SaaS solution to run JMeter tests at scale
- Can use AWS, Google Cloud, your own
machines (reduces configuration
overhead for RMI)
- Integrates with CI tools => measure
performance increase/decrease before a
release

12. Oh btw, don’t use it for DDoS

13. Now we know how our system
performs.
But where to start optimizing?

14. Profiling
Measure the memory usage,
complexity of a program, the
usage of particular instructions
and the frequency and duration of
function calls.

15. Performance lifecycle
Profiling
Changes
Load Testing

16. Application stack
CPU
Memory
Harddisk
Network
OS
Webserver
Script Interpreter
Database
PHP framework
Your application

17. Profiling PHP applications
- Free tools
- Xdebug + Webgrind
- XHProf + XHGUI
- Commercial tools
- Newrelic
- Blackfire.IO

18. Setting up XHProf and profiling an
application

19. Analyzing the callgraph
- Look at the excl. wall time
- Identify database heavy
components
- Check call path for IO operations

20. Optimizing your application
- Use „more“ hardware
- SSD instead of HDD
- Proper caching
- Caching backend (Redis)
- Cacheable output?
- OpCode Cache + APCu!!!
- Reduce/optimize queries

21. Optimizing your software
- Beware of swap
- Update/Upgrade
- Optimize database
- Use alternatives (Nginx, MariaDB,
HipHop)

22. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/
Web_Server_Performance_Comparison

23. https://entwickler.de/online/php-5-6-und-noch-mehr-
performance-139204.html

24. https://www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic

25. https://blog.mariadb.org/performance-evaluation-of-
mariadb-10-1-and-mysql-5-7-4-labs-tplc/

26. Optimizing your database
- Inform yourself (book, webinar, etc.)
- Use the percona toolkit
- Mount your database in memory (just kidding)
- If on a different host, check latency
- Persistent connection?

27. Frontend performance
- pagespeed
- defer loading
- image optimization
- concat, compress, etc.
- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
2014/09/08/improving-smashing-
magazine-performance-case-study/

28. - https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/
profiling-with-xhprof-xhgui-part-1
- https://blackfire.io/
- http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/
hpmysqlger/
- https://www.percona.com/software/
percona-toolkit

29. Thank you
Mail: hhoechtl@1drop.de or jhoechtl@gmail.com
Twitter: @hhoechtl
Blog: http://blog.1drop.de