Less than a week before the launch of what’s widely expected to be the best-selling 5G phone to date, US telco carriers are in a bit of an interesting dilemma. The problem is that several recent articles in places like PC Magazine and the Washington Post have reported that real-world 5G performance and coverage is significantly worse than many hoped for and expected. In fact, in several cities around the country, tests showed that 5G performance was…
It has been six years since I started working on performance testing. Applications I have worked on include an electronic health records application used by more than two hundred thousand physicians nationwide and a backend application that processes millions of lab orders, results, and other messages daily. High availability, high reliability, and high performance are critical for both applications due to their time-sensitive nature. From knowing very little to becoming the leading engineer of a…
Previously, I reported on Intel’s low power, 14nm Core M mobile processor, formerly known by its architecture code name, “Broadwell.” I came away impressed with my first look at what Intel has done both at the silicon and platform architecture level. In a nutshell, Intel has succeeded at taking their previous generation notebook architecture, and while beefing up graphics processing, compute and cache resources, along with a few other tweaks, they’ve brought power consumption down to the 4.5 Watt range, which…
The growing dialogue about the changing software testing trends — especially amid the rise in DevOps and Agile practices — is spawning an epidemic of theories about where the industry is heading. While many of these theories are legitimate, others appear less so. One area of discussion that sets off an alarm bell for me is the idea that performance engineering will replace performance testing. The basic premise of this argument is that instead of executing…
