I was reviewing the Apache JMeter book by PACKT publishing (nice book, will publish the full review soon) and came across a common misunderstanding in software testers about test automation. Full article (455 words) »

Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in many programming languages against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium RC is a powerful and simple framework for running (scheduled or manually) automated UI centric regression tests for web applications / services. Here are few simple tips for Selenium RC java client. I used JUnit for tests. You can use NGUnit too.

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I have significantly improved our site performance in the last month. I did all the site optimization steps by the book, found a lot of new things and fine-tuned existing ideas. There are a couple of good ideas I am yet to implement like using Lighttpd server instead of Apache 2.

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I was watching the mysql queries using mytop just before our server went down. In a flash I realized the cause of our persistent server load problem. I have also come up with an elegant solution which I will implement in the next few days.

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All I really want is to store a very large Hashtable with more reads than writes. It should be able to deal with more than 8GB of data. The key will be a String of limited length. I want it to be extremely fast on read-access, stable with sudden shutdown and other issues beyond our control and with very low CPU usage. The leading contenders in my mind are:
1. HSQLDB
2. H2 Database, from the creator of Hypersonic SQL which is the predecessor of HSQLDB
3. Berkeley DB (Java version)
4. MySQL (least preference)
5. Derby Database
6. One$DB
7. Home-brewed implementation of a souped up Hashtable
8. Prevayler

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In short there is none. Translator Pro / Gold uses an intelligent caching engine to cache the translated pages. However it can happily co-exist with other caching engine like wp-cache 2 or WordPress' object cache. While such engines will not help Translator plugin in any way as it is optimally cached by design, they may help serving the original (untranslated) blog pages.

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WordPress is a popular blogging software. As a design decision it stores the blog content in database and uses php to fetch and display the pages. This consumes more resources (cpu and memory) than blogging softwares generating static pages. Here are 5 tried and tested power tips to reduce memory & cpu resources and speed up your wordpress based sites.

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I tried using eAccelerator alone and then integrated it with PHP Zend Optimizer for better performance. The result was surprising.

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In our effort to fully switchover to Linux as Desktop and Server environment, one of the biggest challenges is to find an alternative to OpenSTA, a popular and very capable open source distributed software testing tool for regression, load and stress testing. In other words OpenSTA is poor man's alternative to LoadRunner & Silk.

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