[Hidden-tech] finding systems to test on

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Daniel Fried wrote:
> I have a resource intensive application that I need to test for 
> performance scaling with hardware, specifically I want to be able to 
> get a better idea of where my bottlenecks are by testing the 
> application on systems with faster processors/more cores and database 
> performance with faster drives.
>
> Can anyone give me some ideas on where I might be able to find some 
> systems I can test on?  I have a .Net application that talks to a 
> MySQL database.  The current dev and qa systems require Windows for 
> the application, but can run MySQL on either Windows (same or 
> different system) or Linux.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.

One of the major points that was made at the Cloud Camp yesterday (by 
the folks from TNR Global, who, I believe, were using the Amazon cloud 
services) was that it made prototyping and testing incredibly easy and 
cost effective. One of their guys described building out a significant 
sized virtual cluster to test disaster recovery. Once the test was 
completed, the whole system could be torn down. Since there were no 
physical machines to be spec'ed out, purchased, set up, configured, 
etc., the whole process could be done in the same day, and the cost was 
just the cost of the resources used that day.

This would give you the flexibility of doing tests on variable sized 
virtual instances. You could run a test today with specifications for 
number of compute units, memory and disk size. Using those results you 
might continue your development, tweak your settings, and then next week 
run another test with a virtual machine specified to twice that number 
of compute units, memory, etc. In the time between now and then there 
are no physical machines hanging around and no cost.

Since I haven't done it myself, I can't tell you the cost, and the guy 
from TNR Global didn't say what their costs were. Only that they were 
extremely affordable and almost nothing compared to the alternative of 
setting up real physical machines. So, you'll have to look into the 
costs for yourself to know if it works for you.


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Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4