Hypebot.com have featured a great article on Benchmarking tools for Twitter Use.

In the Article, titled  3 Top Twitter Tools To Measure & Grow Traffic, the sites some exciting tools that can measure users and traffic volumes.

In the challenging terrain of 2012 that lies before us, understanding the impact of our social media activities is a crucial aspect of knowing where best to spend our valuable time. Here are three Twitter tools, TweetReach, Twitalyzer and #KnowYourFollowers, with a focus on their free options that can help in analyzing such areas as audience reach, impact and demographics.

Though these tools can be used to feed the greedy monster that only wants to see higher numbers, their real usefulness lies in understanding more about one’s audience on Twitter and how that might be used to build the audience for one’s music.

For more information please read 3 Top Twitter Tools To Measure & Grow Traffic

According to gcn.com, The National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed algorithms for automated testing of the multiple variables in software that can cause security faults, and has released a tutorial for using the tools.

The improper or unexpected interaction of two or more parameters in a piece of software, such as inputs or configuration settings, is a significant cause of security bugs. But testing for these problems has been limited by the cost and complexity of testing the huge number of possible combinations. NIST in 2003 reported that such problems cost the U.S. economy more than $59 billion a year despite the fact that more than half of most software development budgets went toward testing.

Research has shown that in many cases the large majority of such faults, from 89 to 100 percent, are caused by combinations of no more than four variables, and virtually all are caused by no more than six, NIST has reported.

The Automated Combinatorial Testing for Software program is a cooperative effort by NIST, the Air Force, and various  Universities have produced methods and tools to generate tests for any number of variable combinations. SP 800-142 offers instructions for their use.

For more details visit gcn.com.

Dynamic Memory Solutions have updated their code debuggers to now find dynamic memory bugs. The companies new product includes improved Leak Check and Memory Minder functionality that can help you exterminate dynamic memory bugs in software quickly and easily.

Dynamic Memory Solutions, a developer of C/C++ software testing tools, leverages software technology to automate the laborious burden of software defect detection, debugging and testing.

The result is vastly improved software quality with a reduction in labor costs and development schedules. Many users break-even in terms of ROI in just days of use. All of Dynamic Memory Solutions’ software testing and debugging tools come with a free trial for prospective customers. 

The advanced memory debugging technology found in the new Leak Check and Memory Minder from Dynamic Memory Solutions is able to detect memory leaks by determining whether the program retains a reference to each block of allocated memory.

Leaks can be detected when the program exits or at any point during program execution allowing maximum flexibility during the testing and debugging process. Additionally, Leak Check monitors the allocation and return of memory blocks and identifies and reports any critical memory management errors

For more information, please visit http://www.dynamic-memory.com

IOzone is a filesystem benchmark tool. The benchmark generates and measures a variety of file operations. Iozone has been ported to many machines and runs under many operating systems.

Iozone is useful for performing a broad filesystem analysis of a vendor’s computer platform. The benchmark tests file I/O performance for the following operations:

Read, write, re-read, re-write, read backwards, read strided, fread, fwrite, random read, pread ,mmap, aio_read, aio_write

While computers are typically purchased with an application in mind it is also likely that over time the application mix will change. Many vendors have enhanced their operating systems to perform well for some frequently used applications. Although this accelerates the I/O for those few applications it is also likely that the system may not perform well for other applications that were not targeted by the operating system. An example of this type of enhancement is: Database.

Many operating systems vendors have tested and tuned the filesystem so it works well with databases. While the database users are happy, the other users may not be so happy as the entire system may be giving all of the system resources to the database users at the expense of all other users. As time rolls on the system administrator may decide that a few more office automation tasks could be shifted to this machine.

The load may now shift from a random reader application (database) to a sequential reader. The users may discover that the machine is very slow when running this new application and become dissatisfied with the decision to purchase this platform. By using Iozone to get a broad filesystem performance coverage the buyer is much more likely to see any hot or cold spots and pick a platform and operating system that is more well balanced.

Benchmark Features:

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Bonnie is a benchmark which measures the performance of Unix file system operations. Bonnie is concerned with identifying bottlenecks; the name is a tribute to Bonnie Raitt, who knows how to use one.Bonnie is not the biggest nor most comprehensive of such programs, but is unequaled (though I say so myself) in its combination of ease-of-use and usefulness-of-output.

Why Bonnie?

I believe that:

* memory is in short supply, so caches max out, thus
* many I/O operations end up really doing I/O, thus
* it’s worthwhile to try to measure real I/O speeds, and
* random seeks on Unix filesystems are appallingly slow.

What Bonnie Does

Bonnie performs a series of tests on a file of known size. If the size is not specified, Bonnie uses 100 Mb; but that probably isn’t enough for a big modern server – you your file to be a lot bigger than the available RAM

Bonnie works with 64-bit pointers if you have them.

For each test, Bonnie reports the bytes processed per elapsed second, per CPU second, and the % CPU usage (user and system).

In each case, an attempt is made to keep optimizers from noticing it’s all bogus. The idea is to make sure that these are real transfers between user space and the physical disk. The tests are:
1. Sequential Output

1.1 Per-Character

The file is written using the putc() stdio macro. The loop that does the writing should be small enough to fit into any reasonable I-cache. The CPU overhead here is that required to do the stdio code plus the OS file space allocation.

1.2 Block

The file is created using write(2). The CPU overhead should be just the OS file space allocation.

1.3 Rewrite

Each Chunk (currently, the size is 16384) of the file is read with read(2), dirtied, and rewritten with write(2), requiring an lseek(2). Since no space allocation is done, and the I/O is well-localized, this should test the effectiveness of the filesystem cache and the speed of data transfer.

2. Sequential Input

2.1 Per-Character

The file is read using the getc() stdio macro. Once again, the inner loop is small. This should exercise only stdio and sequential input.

2.2 Block

The file is read using read(2). This should be a very pure test of sequential input performance.

3. Random Seeks

This test runs SeekProcCount (currently 4) processes in parallel, doing a total of 4000 lseek()s to locations in the file computed using by random() in bsd systems, drand48() on sysV systems. In each case, the block is read with read(2). In 10% of cases, it is dirtied and written back with write(2).

The idea behind the SeekProcCount processes is to make sure there’s always a seek queued up.

AXIOM: For any unix filesystem, the effective number of lseek(2) calls per second declines asymptotically to near 30, once the effect of caching is defeated. [ I wrote the previous sentence in about 1988, and it's a bit better now, but not much ]

The size of the file has a strong nonlinear effect on the results of this test. Many Unix systems that have the memory available will make aggressive efforts to cache the whole thing, and report random I/O rates in the thousands per second, which is ridiculous. As an extreme example, an IBM RISC 6000 with 64 Mb of memory reported 3,722 per second on a 50 Mb file. Some have argued that bypassing the cache is artificial since the cache is just doing what it’s designed to. True, but in any application that requires rapid random access to file(s) significantly larger than main memory which is running on a system which is doing significant other work, the caches will inevitably max out.

For more information on this tool click here

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The IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools can help you administer, secure, and manage IIS. Use them to query log files, deploy SSL certificates, employ custom site authentication, verify permissions, troubleshoot problems, migrate your server, run stress tests, and more.

The following tools are available in this package:

* IIS 6.0 Migration Tool Version 1.0
* Apache to IIS 6.0 Migration Tool Version 1.0
* CustomAuth Version 1.0
* IISCertDeploy.vbs Version 1.0
* IIS Host Helper Service Version 1.0
* IISState Version 3.0
* Log Parser Version 2.1
* Metabase Explorer Version 1.6
* Permissions Verifier Version 1.0
* RemapUrl Version 1.0
* SelfSSL Version 1.0
* TinyGet Version 5.2
* Web Capacity Analysis Tool Version 5.2
* WFetch Version 1.3

For Direct download on this tool click here

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This handy utility will monitor your motherboard and provide you with information about your motherboard`s temperature, voltages, fan speeds ,CPU temperature and more.

Download from Shareware Connection Software Portal

Download Link 1

Click here for more info.

CacheBurst32 is a diagnosis and benchmarking utility designed to measure bandwidth and latency of computer memory and cache subsystem

To download Cache burst 32 click here (48 KB., Freeware, Win9x/Me/NT/2k/XP).

Measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of your hard disks, cd/dvd-roms and floppy. Realtime graphical display.

Click here for more info.

CPU-Z is a freeware detection program base on the Panopsys hardware detection engine.

CPU

• Name and number.
• Core stepping and process.
• Package.
• Core voltage.
• Internal and external clocks, clock multiplier.
• Supported instructions sets.
• Cache information.

Mainboard

• Vendor, model and revision.
• BIOS model and date.
• Chipset (northbridge and southbridge) and sensor.
• Graphic interface.

Memory

• Frequency and timings.
• Module(s) specification using SPD (Serial Presence Detect) : vendor, serial number, timings table.

System

• Windows and DirectX version.

Click here for more info.