Performance Testing and Engineering

The Java heap is the amount of memory allocated to applications running in the JVM.  Garbage collection (GC) refers to the automatic process of managing the run time memory.  The JVM is subject to GC pauses that vary in frequency and duration; if these pauses become more frequent and/or last longer, you will see issues (such as application pauses) which indicate that you may need to tune your Java heap.  The heap is initially created when the JVM starts and is split into different spaces or generations, the key ones being Young (Eden or Nursery) and Tenured (Old) Key symptoms that indicate you need to tune your Java heap are: High CPU usage. When GC threads consume a lot of CPU, you will see spikes in overall CPU usage. Application hangs. When your application appears to hang and stops responding, there are gaps in your log files or you experience general slowness when performing routine tasks, poorly tuned GC can be the cause.

Tuning a Career in Performance: Performance Testing is a type of software testing to ensure software applications will perform well under their expected workload. A software application's performance like its response time, reliability, resource usage and scalability do matter. The goal of Performance Testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks. Performance Testing is popularly called “Perf Testing” and is a subset of performance engineering. Performance Testing is a discipline concerned with testing and reporting the current performance of a software application under various parameters. Performance engineering is the process by which software is tested and tuned with the intent of realizing the required performance. This process aims to optimize the most important application performance trait i.e. user experience. About me: Started career with AppLabs Technologies, (World's First Largest Independent Software Testing company) worked on all