Posting some questions asked to me during one of the interview i had in a german company for position of a performance engineer. I thought it would be good to share these and do share answers to these
Questions
1. What’s the difference between performance testing and performance engineering?
2. What is the difference between performance and scalability?
3. What are the two "directions" in which to scale? Pros and cons of each direction.
4. In a load balancing strategy, what is the difference between "round robin" and "sticky
sessions"?
5. What is the difference between a load balancer and a reverse proxy?
6. In a web architecture, where would you typically decrypt SSL traffic?
7. During testing if you needed to intercept traffic between a HTTP client and a server, what
tools could you use? What if the traffic was encrypted?
8. When a thread running on a CPU needs to access some data, describe some of the
physical locations where that data might be stored, starting with the closest to the
furthest away.
9. What is the classic problem involved with using caches?
10. Rather than requesting the same full response each time, how would a HTTP client
check to see if the previous response for the same request had updated on the HTTP
server?
11. In relational databases, what are common "performance killer" queries?
12. What can you do to improve query performance?
13. In performance testing, what is the difference between load, stress, and soak testing?
14. When conducting a code review, what are the common performance anti-patterns that
you look out for?
15. Explain the -Xmx and -Xms parameters of the JVM?
16. If a production web app is not responding, how can you figure out what is wrong?
17. How many application servers are needed to support the customer base?
18. Which specific hardware configurations provide the best performance? How can vendor
default configurations be tuned to suit this specific infrastructure and application?
19. What system resources need tuning to give optimal performance?
20. How to anticipate the current production server capability?
21. How would you determine the security exposure of the current system?
22. What should be the ideal firewall configs in order to achieve the maximum performance?
23. What are your views on IDS (Intrusion Detection System).
24. What tools will you use for monitoring the production servers?
25. What are the information you would need before starting performance tuning/ testing of a
system?
26. Design a performance testing scenario and plan for the following architecture.
27. What tools would you use in the above scenario? What are the parameters you would
look for in the results?
28. Design an automated performance engineering framework for continuous integration.
Questions
1. What’s the difference between performance testing and performance engineering?
2. What is the difference between performance and scalability?
3. What are the two "directions" in which to scale? Pros and cons of each direction.
4. In a load balancing strategy, what is the difference between "round robin" and "sticky
sessions"?
5. What is the difference between a load balancer and a reverse proxy?
6. In a web architecture, where would you typically decrypt SSL traffic?
7. During testing if you needed to intercept traffic between a HTTP client and a server, what
tools could you use? What if the traffic was encrypted?
8. When a thread running on a CPU needs to access some data, describe some of the
physical locations where that data might be stored, starting with the closest to the
furthest away.
9. What is the classic problem involved with using caches?
10. Rather than requesting the same full response each time, how would a HTTP client
check to see if the previous response for the same request had updated on the HTTP
server?
11. In relational databases, what are common "performance killer" queries?
12. What can you do to improve query performance?
13. In performance testing, what is the difference between load, stress, and soak testing?
14. When conducting a code review, what are the common performance anti-patterns that
you look out for?
15. Explain the -Xmx and -Xms parameters of the JVM?
16. If a production web app is not responding, how can you figure out what is wrong?
17. How many application servers are needed to support the customer base?
18. Which specific hardware configurations provide the best performance? How can vendor
default configurations be tuned to suit this specific infrastructure and application?
19. What system resources need tuning to give optimal performance?
20. How to anticipate the current production server capability?
21. How would you determine the security exposure of the current system?
22. What should be the ideal firewall configs in order to achieve the maximum performance?
23. What are your views on IDS (Intrusion Detection System).
24. What tools will you use for monitoring the production servers?
25. What are the information you would need before starting performance tuning/ testing of a
system?
26. Design a performance testing scenario and plan for the following architecture.
27. What tools would you use in the above scenario? What are the parameters you would
look for in the results?
28. Design an automated performance engineering framework for continuous integration.
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