Test the Performance and Scalability of Your Web Applications With Tsung | BeeBuzz
http://beebole.com/blog/erlang/test-performance-and-scalability-of-your-web-applications-with-tsung/

perfomance and scalability testing of a website

stress test your web app

What is Tsung ? The purpose of Tsung is to simulate users in order to test the scalability and performance of IP based client/server applications. You can use it to do load and stress testing of your servers. (Definition coming from the Tsung website) In this post, I will introduce the use of Tsung in order for you to stress test your web applications. Why Tsung ? Because it’s an Open-Source project and, to tell the truth, mainly because this application has been coded in Erlang which gives Tsung a little advantage on the other tools: it has the potential to simulate A LOT of concurrent requests … without crashing. That’s what we expect from a stress testing app, isn’t it? Let’s start the installation We will need the Perl Templating-Toolkit and the Gnu plotting utility in order to create nice HTML and graphical reports with the result data set. So, back to your command prompt: ~$ sudo apt-get install gnuplot-nox libtemplate-perl libhtml-template-perl libhtml-template-expr-pe

ウェブアプリケーションのパフォーマンステスト用ツール Tsung の使い方

this is an awesome article.

Sailors are given 30 seconds to answer or they're kicked out of the program. If they say they want to keep going, they're given another 30 seconds to recover and then they're thrown back into the pool. It may sound sadistic, but the Navy is simply trying to identify who will survive the most dangerous missions and who won't. Through this grueling test, it finds soldiers and sailors who refuse to give up, who can suppress the need to breathe, who trust that they'll be rescued if something goes wrong and who are prepared to lose consciousness—or even die—following orders.

From low-budgets to rush jobs to piss-poor project management, every designer has one time or another faced the inevitable, "I need a logo (brochure, website, etc.) done ASAP" scenario. Depending on the designers’ work situation, some can simply choose to decline these projects. But for many full-time designers, this “rushing creative” is a very real and necessary part of their job requirement. So when asked to “just slap a design together” or “crank it out,” how do we as designers maintain our standards and integrity when a logo must be created in three hours? Or a website in a day? And for that matter, can we?

How to cope with impossible deadlines. via VERB/LinkedIn.

Article about fast food design jobs

From low-budgets to rush jobs to piss-poor project management, every designer has one time or another faced the inevitable, "I need a logo (brochure, website, etc.) done ASAP" scenario.

Way to dolve pressure

Thesis?

The 10 Essential Rules for Slowing Down and Enjoying Life More | Zen Habits - 061309 1235PM

A Beautiful Method to Find Peace of Mind

See it as part of the adventure.

@tommorris: "Oh my, justification at last: http://is.gd/4Pdl0" (from http://twitter.com/tommorris/status/5493288033)

I like this

'A grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies".'

In a bad mood? Don't worry - according to research, it's good for you.

n "promotes information processing strategies". Negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world Professor Joe Forgas He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats...

rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources.

"Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism." Via Mindhacks.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

The Economist | Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals

Unique tips for dealing with stress.

The point is, stress attacks in all sorts of ways—which means that if you want to control it, contain it, conquer it, you need to fire back in kind.

52 Ways to Control and Conquer Stress http://twurl.nl/o7dr0x [from http://twitter.com/JonayCom/statuses/1648117599]

A good back massage can relieve pain, anxiety, and stress, as well as increase physical intimacy, if desired. The following techniques will help you learn how to give a good back massage. Finding a volunteer to practice on shouldn't be too hard!

wikiHow article about How to Give a Back Massage.

Just as our bodies are wired to react to stress, we're all also programmed to know how to wind down, whether it's by watching a funny movie, sitting in the sauna, sipping some chamomile tea (while dunking a cookie, of course!) or drinking a glass (or two) of wine with dinner. These activities switch on the brain's pleasure centers, blocking the production of the stress hormone cortisol and churning out happiness-inducing chemicals like serotonin instead.

Try a few of these instant soothers, and watch your own stress go from ARGH! to Ahhh.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Sick Systems

sick systems, sick workplaces

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you'll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you'll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn't, you'll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there's a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It's the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people. How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy: Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises.

Creating sick systems to ensnare unwitting lovers and/or employees.