By Sven Hammar At the end of 2012, Apica conducted a massive load test for an election campaign organization. It was the largest load test we ever conducted, surpassing the two million virtual user mark we set earlier that year. The load test clocked in at over 200,000 requests per second for an enti... Jan. 21, 2014 09:05 AM EST Reads: 372 |
By Sven Hammar Wednesday, October 9, we will be on site in Washington DC as a Gold Sponsor at Akamai Edge 2013 Customer Conference. Take this opportunity to meet and listen to key members from the industry providing valuable tips and advice. What is going on in the cloud? Mobile, media, and security?... Sep. 26, 2013 08:05 AM EDT Reads: 451 |
By Sven Hammar Thursday, September 19th, is the date to reserve in your calendar. This is the date of the first visit ever for Amazon Web Services Summit in Stockholm and Sweden. Perhaps the most important event within AWS Cloud Computing in Scandinavia in 2013. AWS Summit Nordic is a free one day ev... Sep. 16, 2013 05:01 AM EDT Reads: 1,019 |
By Sven Hammar So you made a decision to move to the Cloud – well done. With the proper planning and approach, the cloud can provide the perfect dynamic infrastructure for your organization and your web sites and services. Following are five best practices to use. If you can consider these steps, you... Mar. 19, 2013 07:20 AM EDT Reads: 697 |
By Sven Hammar In 2013, mobile devices will pass PCs to be most common Web access tools. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. These trends were highlighted by Gartner research in... Jan. 24, 2013 03:07 AM EST Reads: 1,750 |
By Sven Hammar We broke our own load testing record – again. Apica was engaged in November to quickly conduct a massive load test for a South American election campaign organization. We believe this was the largest load test ever conducted, surpassing the two million virtual user mark we set earlier ... Dec. 20, 2012 08:32 AM EST Reads: 775 |
By Sven Hammar Moving into 2013 the demand for flexible, on-demand load testing is at an all-time high. Organizations have finally and overwhelmingly recognized the importance of application uptime to customer relations, brand reputation, and the bottom line, and are looking to take control of their ... Dec. 17, 2012 11:36 AM EST Reads: 802 |
By Sven Hammar Great news! For the second year in a row, Apica has been ranked on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). We’ve been working diligently over the past year to add new partners; expand o... Dec. 5, 2012 12:12 PM EST Reads: 628 |
By Sven Hammar  For the past few years, our friends at VMblog.com have run an annual prediction series forecasting the trends most likely to drive adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies in the upcoming year. This is the second year in a row that they’ve invited me to contribute, and I thoug... Dec. 5, 2012 06:00 AM EST Reads: 6,683 |
By Sven Hammar Retailers might have started offering online holiday discounts earlier than in years past, but that didn’t seem to have much effect on retail activity or sales this Cyber Monday. According to IBM, Internet sales rose 30.3 percent yesterday, making it the biggest online shopping d... Nov. 27, 2012 12:57 PM EST Reads: 1,452 |
By Sven Hammar Thanksgiving weekend: the truest test of website preparation and performance an online retailer can expect to encounter. It is the culmination of months of strategizing and testing, of not only determining the most jaw-dropping deals, but of ensuring one’s web infrastructure is s... Nov. 26, 2012 01:40 AM EST Reads: 632 |
By Sven Hammar The National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts that this year’s holiday sales will increase 4.1 percent to $586.1 billion. But here’s a wrinkle in the data that nobody really records: The companies that are making money are those that have fast, responsive websites. Companie... Nov. 21, 2012 11:29 AM EST Reads: 1,604 |
By Sven Hammar Earlier this week, Amazon added a brand new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region to its Global Infrastructure. The Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, as it is being called, offers important benefits to organizations operating in this area. Companies can run their cloud-based applications throug... Nov. 16, 2012 10:29 AM EST Reads: 1,558 |
By Sven Hammar  Could you imagine NASA sending a rocket into space without testing it first? What about a racing team putting a brand new car on the track without taking it for a few laps to test the handling and stability? It seems to me that testing is inherent in every technical field — except for ... Nov. 14, 2012 03:45 PM EST Reads: 3,910 |
By Sven Hammar A few weeks ago we shared with you the new features in Apica ProxySniffer 5.0, but we don’t want to just tell you about them. We want to show you! Today’s Quick Tip video will look at Apica ProxySniffer 5.0′s LoadTest integration and parallel testing with multithreadi... Nov. 14, 2012 01:12 AM EST Reads: 431 |
By Sven Hammar The Twitter Election. That’s what everyone’s been calling it. Twitter has ushered in a whole new era of politics. The 2012 presidential race is the first in which voters could interact directly with the candidates (if not, their spokespeople); the first in which candidate t... Nov. 7, 2012 03:24 PM EST Reads: 933 |
By Sven Hammar Creating highly targeted load tests for your web server doesn’t have to be complicated. And it won’t be, at least not if you know what to look for. The secret is to approach a load test with the mind of a developer. You’re not going to run a test just to punish your w... Nov. 1, 2012 09:33 AM EDT Reads: 711 |
By Sven Hammar Today’s Quick Tip video will highlight one of the most exciting features of the Apica WebPerformance portal: AppDynamics and Google Analytics integration. This new functionality enables you to correlate and compare live data from all three platforms directly in the WebPerformance... Oct. 29, 2012 08:51 AM EDT Reads: 1,095 |
By Sven Hammar  On Monday, Amazon Web Services — the leading provider of cloud services — suffered an outage, and as a result, a long list of well-known and popular websites went dark. According to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, the outage started out as degraded performance of a... Oct. 26, 2012 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,625 |
By Sven Hammar Groupon, LivingSocial, Dealfind — these sites exist because consumers will always be looking for bigger and better deals on the products and services they love. But while you might think that your business landing a promotion on one of these sites would be a good thing, what happ... Oct. 23, 2012 01:38 AM EDT Reads: 350 |
By Sven Hammar In our last Quick Tip video, we walked you through the web performance setup process. Today we will demonstrate how to create instant web performance reports or set up a subscription for daily, weekly, or monthly reports in the newly enhanced Apica WebPerformance portal. Within the por... Oct. 19, 2012 10:04 AM EDT Reads: 400 |
By Sven Hammar Last week a few of my colleagues and I flew out to Las Vegas to attend Akamai Edge 2012, Akamai’s annual customer conference. The event is a great opportunity to see the latest advancements in Akamai technology as well as network with Akamai partners, customers, and other Interne... Oct. 17, 2012 12:28 PM EDT Reads: 1,677 |
By Sven Hammar  The intentions behind APT are all about espionage — not just state-sponsored espionage but also extensive and well-organized industrial espionage. APT is not about any particular technology or technique. The actual attack can range from social engineering, viruses and trojans, network ... Oct. 17, 2012 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 4,242 |
By Sven Hammar If presidential elections were based on web performance, we’d likely be inaugurating a new president in a few months. With just over one month until the culmination of the 2012 presidential race, we thought it would be fun to take a look at the websites of both candidates and pol... Oct. 11, 2012 10:38 AM EDT Reads: 344 |
By Sven Hammar Last Wednesday, we revealed the newest features of the Apica WebPerformance portal. To help you start taking advantage of these enhancements, we’re going to be offering a series of Quick Tip videos over the next few weeks that walk you through web performance monitoring setup, re... Oct. 8, 2012 10:14 AM EDT Reads: 697 |
By Sven Hammar While President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney were dueling it out over the hot-button campaign issues last night, little did they know the debate was becoming the most-tweeted about political event in U.S. history, topping the tweet-per-minute records set... Oct. 4, 2012 11:16 AM EDT Reads: 533 |
By Sven Hammar Earlier this summer, Apica advanced its mega load testing capabilities through the acquisition of ProxySniffer, the advanced web load and stress testing tool. Today, we upped the ante a little bit more with the release of ProxySniffer’s newest version. Apica ProxySniffer 5.0 is c... Oct. 4, 2012 07:37 AM EDT Reads: 460 |
By Sven Hammar It is another exciting day here at Apica. This week our team is at The O’Reilly Velocity Europe Conference where we just announced the latest enhancements to our WebPerformance portal. We are constantly looking for ways to deepen the level of insight our web performance monitorin... Oct. 2, 2012 10:35 AM EDT Reads: 993 |
By Sven Hammar For our latest web performance benchmark we decided to take a look at some popular music streaming sites. There are obviously dozens of websites and applications that allow you to listen to your favorite tunes at anytime and from anywhere so we decided to hone in specifically on those ... Sep. 20, 2012 12:24 PM EDT Reads: 1,047 |
By Sven Hammar If you’ve been paying attention to our press releases for the past few months, you’ve no doubt seen that we’ve been partnering with some of the leaders in web, mobile, and cloud services. We’re thrilled to bring our performance monitoring and load testing tools to a growing number of c... Sep. 11, 2012 05:26 PM EDT Reads: 1,888 |
By Sven Hammar For the past few days, the Apica team has been in Amsterdam attending the 2012 Sitecore Symposium. Yesterday, I delivered a session about best practices for performance tests within CMS installations. The idea was to help attendees identify weak spots and performance issues in their we... Sep. 7, 2012 03:19 AM EDT Reads: 684 |
By Sven Hammar The World Wide Web Foundation has released the results of its first-ever Web Index that lists Internet usage of 61 countries. The Web Index is the first to compare Internet usage, access, and impact across 61 countries throughout the world. According to the report, Sweden is the best ... Sep. 6, 2012 03:58 AM EDT Reads: 441 |
By Sven Hammar With Labor Day still a couple of weeks away, and record-high temperatures scorching parts of the U.S. and Europe, summer is a long way from over. This is good news — if you haven’t yet exchanged your suits and heels for swimsuits and a pair of flip-flops, you still have tim... Aug. 22, 2012 03:23 PM EDT Reads: 542 |
By Sven Hammar Last month, EMA Research Director Julie Craig and I conducted our webinar, “A Fresh Approach to Cloud Application Optimization: What’s Now, What’s New, and What’s Coming.” If you weren’t able to attend, here’s some of what you missed. Detailed ... Aug. 15, 2012 04:20 PM EDT Reads: 455 |
By Sven Hammar After two weeks of Olympic play and the continuous performance monitoring of Olympics-related websites, the results are in. The final medalists in the website performance category of the 2012 London Olympics are: Gold: YouTube, for outstanding performance on both the YouTube London2012... Aug. 13, 2012 03:41 PM EDT Reads: 570 |
By Sven Hammar As previously noted, Apica is monitoring the website performance of London2012.com and other sites reporting on and streaming the 2012 Olympic Games. So far, reports indicate that website traffic is already surpassing that of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On Aug. 2 AdWeek reported that 28... Aug. 10, 2012 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 570 |
By Sven Hammar With just under four months to go until the holiday season, it’s time for IT development departments to get ahead and ensure a successful and scalable season come November and December. Why prepare now? More than likely, it’s quiet in the office. So while everyone else is o... Aug. 8, 2012 10:43 AM EDT Reads: 522 |
By Sven Hammar The London 2012 Olympics started off strong on Friday night as the host country treated sports fans and patriots across the globe to a memorable opening ceremony: a look at country history during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, a parachute arrival by the Queen and James Bo... Jul. 31, 2012 06:29 AM EDT Reads: 467 |
By Sven Hammar Apica’s checks* confirm that Twitter.com experienced an outage beginning at 11:23 a.m. EDT. It remained completely down until 12:04 p.m., recovered briefly, and then became unavailable again at approximately 12:15 p.m. At 12:58 p.m. Twitter started delivering server-side error co... Jul. 26, 2012 01:06 PM EDT Reads: 388 |
By Sven Hammar You’ve depended on load testing and web monitoring to optimize cloud applications for years. But what if a technology came along that rivaled everything you thought you knew? Let us tell you what’s next for cloud application optimization in our webinar, “A Fresh Appro... Jul. 17, 2012 05:30 AM EDT Reads: 445 |
Sven Hammar is Co-Founder and CEO of Apica. In 2005, he had the vision of starting a new SaaS company focused on application testing and performance. Today, that concept is Apica, the third IT company I’ve helped found in my career.
