Performance tests and other lies
It is a well-known truth that few of us care about the performance of our code, even fewer of us have dealt with performance tests. Among those of us who have an unequal struggle with efficiency, a small handful of us are aware of how many lies, understatements and false promises lie hidden in them.
During the presentation, we will learn anti-patterns in performance testing and some battle-tested practical advice on how not to be fooled by test results.
Should we be afraid of "coordinated ommision"? Why statistics is the highest form of lying, aka a quick course in reading test results. Why are "latency" and "throughput" not the same? Why are test datasets as important as test scenarios? What questions do microbenchmarks answer? Do performance tests have layers? Why isn't performance testing about numbers? These are just some of the topics I will talk about.
If you are not interested in performance testing and you avoid this topic like the plague, in this presentation you will find out why. However, if you feel like a "higher priest of the machine" and you are familiar with performance topics, I will help you design tests with greater awareness and interpret their results.
ABOUT SPEAKER
For over 20 years in the IT industry, as a database administrator, programmer, architect, manager and "onsite disaster engineer". I took part in small, medium and nonsensically large projects carried out according to "Waterfall" rules, Agile and in the absence of any methodologies, always with the same effect. Which led me to the conclusion that it doesn't matter what you do as long as you do it in the simplest possible way and use the right tools to do the work for you. Recently I spent too much time exploring JVM's best kept secrets, reading about mangaged runtimes, parsers and interpreters. From time to time you can hear my low-quality jokes about architecture at conferences in Poland. I am also the author of a blog on http://geekyprimitives.com/, one of the founders of SegFault conferences brand and full time benchmarking infrastructure engineer at Neo4j.
