Painful and Tedious, and I’m Not Talking About My Site

My gigantic cool project is in QA and almost done. My talented QA Engineer is now load testing it. I hate load testing. It’s the worst pain you can inflict on me is to make me sit around fretting while you clobber the living crap out of my baby until it gives. It’s even worse when you come back and tell me there’s memory growth. Then, I have to make sure you’ve got everything configured correctly. If you do, then it means I’ve messed up and I have to scour several thousands of lines of code for variables that aren’t unset. Even then, I may not find it. Why is it so bad? Because I can’t do it myself. Things may work beautifully in development and then completely fall apart under stress (kind of like Tim Allen’s movie career).

The latest is that after fixing the config problem, we’re doing fine after running 1000 queries. Yeah, well, we’ll see. I’m gonna go start a bad addictive habit to recover from the stress. Any suggestions?

By Kevin Lawver

Web developer, Software Engineer @ Gusto, Co-founder @ TechSAV, husband, father, aspiring social capitalist and troublemaker.