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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to test a Rails-based JSON web service. LoadRunner would fit my needs, but I need a free solution.
JMeter is free and scriptable, you should have a look.
What is your virtual user need? Some of the commercial tools offer no cost versions at a limited load level, so before addressing your need I am looking for more specifics on the virtual user number requirements.
For clarification, are you looking for a tool which can produce a ACM/IEEE definition stress test from a scheduler perspective? This would be a test which increases in load by a defined interval every ~n~ seconds|minutes|hours until the system collapses or a particular metric is achieved, such as response time exceeds SLA value by 250% for five minutes or CPU is greater than 90% for 45 seconds, etc.... Schedulers are all over the map in the tools space, some are better than others when it comes to Stress, most work equally well for a defined load level.
How does monitoring fit into your tool model? Are there specific architectural components which you would like to monitor which would drive a tool? This will help you identify system bottlenecks in the use of resources on architectural components.
What about your team skills? You mention scripting, but how much are you expecting the tool to handle for you. Some of the open source tools are great, but they mandate that a person be a highly skilled developer to get the most out of the tool. The commercial side rounds some of the edges off of the tools, but in general you are still going to need to be proficient in the language of the tool. If you need Python, that takes you one path, Java another, VB a third, Pascal a fourth, C a fifth, etc.... Sometimes its easier to document what languages you know and know well and concentrate on tools that fit that model as trying to learn a new tool and a new language at the same time rarely yields benefits.
Have a look to AgileLoad it is free for small test and provide both recording and advanced scipting features. It is compatible with JSon service. It is quite easy to use, there is also tutorials and video on how to use the tool on the website. Support is free and the support team can helps you with scripting process.
I'd also take a look at The Grinder. It has a nice feature where you can create your load script by recording your browser activity.
There is a version of Load Tester that is free and has no limits on the number of virtual users you can run: Load Tester LITE.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
Sorry to raise this question. But I see a need to update the best log analyzer tools list.
I used BairTail. It's simple and fast. But the development stopped in 2007 and never updated thereafter and no search functionality for free users
Then moved to LogExpert, it's good and free with search functionality. But it's damn slow when log size goes by 2-3mb and scrolling is pain
Apache Chainsaw, other than it's from Apache, i would say it's pretty hard for developer who wants to analyze logs bit fast without doing all regex and manual work. It's too much deviation from normal usage and pretty slow
Please suggest one good/best Log Analyze tool [freeware]
Simple Search functionality and highlight is must
Should run smooth with minimum cpu resources
It will be used upto analyzing 30-50mb files
Scrolling and GUI friendly. I use in windows environment and need GUI tools only
I used otroslogviewer to analyze generated logfiles on windows. I used it with 500MB files without any performance or stability. It's free, open scource and the development is still active. It has a pattern auto detect for Java.util.logging or you can pass in your PatternLayout from log4j or describe your custom setup to parse the log messages. You can search (optional with RegEx), mark and filter results and use highlighting (for stacktraces or XML etc.). It's the best choise for me, I found in the web.
The latest developer snapshot of Chainsaw is much improved. You don't need to use regexps, just type a word in the search or filter box to get a case-insensitive partial text match (single quotes around it if it's more than one word)..
Chainsaw now has the ability to annotate the notes (click in the 'marker' field), provides tons of ways to customize the UI, and has an improved config screen (you can build a Chainsaw config by giving it your log4j config file containing a fileappender definition)..It's maybe worth giving it another look.
Developer snapshot available here:
http://people.apache.org/~sdeboy
My two cents..
I'm afraid you will not find a free piece of software which does what you ask for. Here are some reasons coming to mind.
formats of plain text log files are madly fragmented, it's very hard to make it useful - you asked for good quality and simplicity of use, right?. It may sound simple, but it's not. To make it user friendly makes it even more complicated, free software never worries too much about usability.
open source (or freebees) don't do GUI stuff in general, aside from several exceptions, so don't expect to find state of the art user interfaces. Open source is great with frameworks, libraries, server stuff, and never with UI and definitely not with usability.
Serious log analysis tool based on files is strange to put it gently. To do the analysis one needs structured data. Crunching heaps of data in GUI app is not practical. This is why nobody bothered to create anything like this and give it away.
So, you will find bits of this puzzle separately - you will find some cool log parser for free, or you will find some cool log viewer for free, you will find indexer and fantastic data storage for logs.. But you will never find a free complete solution for the reasons above mentioned.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm a developer and need to collaborate with an UI designer and a project manager. so there are a lot of documents we need to share and the project manager will assign me tasks about the project. Instead of email and dropbox, what's the best way to do it?
You could look at varying other online collaboration tools out there. I use Clinked (http://clinked.com/) at work, and although we use a the paid version there is a free one for 5 users or less so maybe you could check that out?
My team and I have been using Wrike for almost a year now, and I have to say it’s pretty neat in terms of collaboration. We have to deal with lots of documentation and edit-approve iterations, and Wrike made it all really simple. Basically, each member of the team just opens a needed doc, edits it, saves, and it’s automatically uploaded as a new version, so no download and no multiple versions of the same doc. And every time there’s been a change it sends a notification to my e-mail, so it’s really easy to keep track on what’s going on with a task. It’s also integrated with Google docs, so you can choose whatever suits your needs better. I, personally, love its e-mail integration (it converts my e-mails into tasks, I just need to add Wrike into the e-mail’s CC and it will be transferred into the app) and Outlook add-in, as it helps to keep all our data in one place. It works perfectly for our task management needs, too. Especially with its Activity Stream that makes it really easy to stay updated with the tasks’ changes and discuss any coming issue.
Hope you’ll find it useful too! Let me know how it went afterwards.
You might find this list of 43 project management software alternatives useful:
http://blog.timedoctor.com/2011/02/02/43-project-management-software-alternatives
My personal favorites are Basecamp, Time Doctor and Dropbox. These programs have helped my team in a lot of ways especially productivity. I'm sure you'll find yours there too. It's the most helpful and comprehensive list I was able to get.
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Closed 10 years ago.
When it comes to scripting the Mac, are there alternatives to Applescript? Its API seems awesome, but the language itself, from what I've read so far, seems aimed more at non-programmers.
Insights into this would be greatly helpful.
(At the moment, I'm thinking of writing a tiling window manager for the Mac.
Yes, I know some exist, but this will be open source.
Yes, I know of Xmonad, but it only does X11 windows.)
Thanks!
When it comes to scripting the Mac, are there alternatives to Applescript?
Depends what you want to do. If you want to send Apple events to other applications, yes; for running scripts from OSA-aware applications (Mail rules, folder actions, etc.), not really.
The best technical alternative is appscript (my baby), which is available for Python, Ruby and Objective-C on 10.4+. (There's also a MacRuby version, but I've yet to do a public release of that.) Feature-wise appscript's slightly better than AppleScript and its application compatibility is very nearly as good. Third-party project, so you'll need to install it yourself (but that's easy enough as long as you've got Xcode) and MIT licensed so you can redistribute it as needed (e.g. included in your application bundle). Fairly decent tool and documentation support, including an online book by Matt Neuburg, with mailing list support for the Python and Ruby versions and direct email support for the others.
The 'official' alternative is Apple's Scripting Bridge. The API looks very Cocoa-like, but that's really just a lot of smoke and mirrors which ultimately makes it less capable than AppleScript and significantly more prone to application compatibility problems (and tricky to troubleshoot when it does go wrong). Tool, documentation and community support is not so great either (appscript's is better; AppleScript's is better still). SB's main advantage is that it's included in 10.5+ so requires no additional installation to use. I wouldn't recommend it for heavy-duty automation work due to its technical shortcomings, but for modest automation tasks involving obliging apps it may suffice.
Other bridges do exist (e.g. Perl's Mac::Glue, RubyOSA), but they are not as capable, popular and/or actively supported.
All that said, if you want to do any serious application scripting, you will still have to learn AppleScript as that's where you'll find the vast bulk of literature, sample scripts and community expertise. All of which you will need, since the great majority of scriptable applications are notoriously under-documented.
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Closed 10 years ago.
We user JIRA for bug tracking and release management and we have started using greenhopper for project management inside of JIRA but one thing that it lacks is the idea of user stories versus tasks in those users stories. Does anyone recommend other task board like agile project management tools that fully support users stories and tasks as well as being fast and simple to user. I started looking at targetprocess so if anyone has feedback on that specifically it would be great as well.
TargetProcess is the least intrusive project mgmt tool I've used.
A common anti-pattern for Scrum and XP teams is to break stories down into tasks, track those tasks, and at the end of the iteration notice that all tasks are done, but the user stories aren't (because they are more than just the sum of their tasks).
I highly recommend not tracking tasks at all. Brainstorm them for estimation, if you like, but always estimate and track whole stories. If a story is to big, break it down into smaller stories - that sometimes takes some creativity, but it's almost always possible.
You can use sub-issues in Jira to aggregate stories into bigger stories, although this isn't very well supported by greenhopper, as far as I remember. If your team is colocated, I would very highly recommend index cards on a white board, anyway - even additionally to Jira, if you have to (that's how we currently work).
Whiteboard and sticky notes or note cards.
I know you asked for software, but depending on your environment it might be hard to beat the communication value of a publicly visible task chart.
But if you must have software there's also Rally and VersionOne.
My company have been using TargetProcess for a while and we are very pleased with the product. Whenever we have experienced problems or bugs, we have reported it to them and the problem or bug is solved really fast. It's a great tool that worked well with SCRUM. I really recommend it.
Acunote is the best one I've found to-date. Really easy, simple and quick to use.
We use Jira with GreenHopper with no problems. If you have control over the configuration of your Jira instance, you can easily create a story issue type that allows having sub-tasks. During the planning phase, we drop the stories onto the next version, and split them into sub-tasks, estimated in more precise time and assigned to team members. If those tasks are separate you can also convert them into sub-tasks of a specific story.
Thoughtworks would be happy to sell you Mingle
Take a look at http://AgileZen.com/
take a look at jazz: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=44577, http://jazz.net/pub/index.jsp
We've just released a brand-new tool called Crew which might work for you. It's very flexible and allows you to set up a project structure and workflow that fits your process.
http://www.devmynd.com/crew
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm looking for some software to monitor a single server for performance alerts. Preferably free and with a reasonable default configuration.
Edit: To clarify, I would like to run this software on a Windows machine and monitor a remote Windows server for CPU/memory/etc. usage alerts (not a single application).
Edit: I suppose its not necessary that this software be run remotely, I would also settle for something that ran on the server and emailed me if there was an alert. It seems like Windows performance logs and alerts might be used for this purpose somehow but it was not immediately obvious to me.
Edit: Found a neat tool on the coding horror blog, not as useful for remote monitoring but very useful for things you would worry about as a server admin: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ff_rmon.asp
For performance monitor - start it on the server (Win+R and enter
"perfmon"). Select "Performance Logs and Alerts" and expand. Select "Alerts". Select "Action" & then "New Alert". Give the alert a name, click "Add" to add a counter (there are hundres of counters, for example CPU %), then give it some limits.
Select the "Action" tab, and then decide what you want to do. You may need a third party program - for example Blat to send emails - but basiaclly any script can be run.
I've been experimenting with munin for monitoring around 8 Windows 2003 servers.
http://munin.projects.linpro.no/
Its a free linux-based system and the Windows agent works well & is easily extensible. Setup is simple if you have some minimal linux knowledge.
If you want something free, try Nagios.
http://www.nagios.org/
You can configure you perfmon to collect specific counters to "Trace Logs" files on your hard drive. We usually keep daily logs for important counters:
Vital signs (CPU, Memory, HDD space)
Application specific (ASP.Net counters / SQL Counters)
Custom counters if your applicaiton exposes such
You can add "Alerts" for specific counters / counters groups and define actions when these alerts fire.
A list of monitoring tools from the High Scalability blog
I kind of like Perfmon myself. It comes with windows out of the box and has support for a lot of different measurements.
MS's solutions used to be called MOM. It looks like it's been redesigned a bit since I last used it.