Performance testing can be a tricky proposition, how many times have you deployed code that fell apart in production? (Hey, we've all done it!) Having a staging environment, which replicates the data and deployment environments are great first steps, but even that often falls short from producing reliable results. And that is where load testing comes in: we need to test our application in the context of a multi-user audience interacting with all of the components of our site. Great, but how do we do that? Well, why not just grab the access logs from your current production environment, and replay them!
Filebench is a new framework for simulating applications on file systems.Filebench is quick to set up and use unlike many of the commercial benchmarks which it can emulate. It is also a handy tool for micro-benchmarking storage subsystems and studying the relationships of complex applications such as relational databases with their storage without having to incur the costs of setting up those applications, loading data and so forth.
Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye, according to Tim Bray) is a new project hosting platform from Sun. It integrates several source code management systems, forums, mailinglists, issue-tracking systems and wikis. In this regard it's similar to Google Code, RubyForge and SourceForge. GitHub, like Kenai, is built on Ruby on Rails, is currently focussed on hosting git repositories. Sun, as one of the biggest open source supporting companies in the world now also offers a platform, not only for its own projects, but for arbitrary open source projects.