Monthly Archives: May 2011

Linux, Testing, XLT

XLT 4.0.5 Amazon-EC2 AMIs available

These are the AMI-IDs of the XLT 4.0.5 images for Amazon-EC2.

  • EU-West: ami-772b1d03
  • US-East: ami-52649b3b
  • US-West: ami-29bfec6c

Images can be used free of charge. The EU image is brand new and features Ubuntu 11.04. It has also a smaller disk of only 8GB compared to 15GB before. This helps to make it eligible for a free tier micro instance. Of course this instance type is not recommended for load testing, but you can easily test deployment and remote execution of XLT before you move up to more expensive setups.

Java, Software Development

Spurious wakeup – the rare event

After hunting for quite some time for a strange application behavior, I finally found the reason.

The Problem

The Java application was behaving strangely in 4 out of 10 runs. It did not process all data available and assumed that the data input already ended. The application features several producer-consumer patterns, where one thread offers preprocessed data to the next one, passing it into a buffer where the next thread reads it from.

The consumer or producer fall into a wait state in case no data is available or the buffer is full. In case of a state change, the active threads notifies all waiting threads about the new data or the fact that all data is consumed.

On 2-core and 8-core machines, the application was running fine but when we moved it to 24-cores, it suddenly started to act in an unpredictable manner.
Continue reading Spurious wakeup – the rare event →

Software, XLT

XLT 4.0.5 is out

We just released Xceptance LoadTest 4.0.5. It is a minor update and recommended for everyone. But you might have special interests if you use the Script Developer heavily.

Besides a few defect fixes, release 4.0.5 delivers four great improvements to speed up test case creation and maintenance with Script Developer and make your work more productive.

  • The XLT Script Developer runs on Firefox 4 and 3 now.
  • Test variables are now resolved recursively, so you can use variables within resolved content.
  • There is no need to open modules anymore if you want to edit a line or two of it. Also enabling/disabling of module code can be done easily from the main test case. This saves time and aids script maintenance.
  • During script debugging and script execution, you can now evaluate assertions instantly to see whether or not your verification expression will match.

The full set of release notes can be viewed directly in the release area. You will also find documentation and the download link there. As usual, th