AJAX Load Testing and Performance
Modern web-based applications are getting smarter and easier to use even as the wow factor gets more impressive. Of course, ease of use always has a cost. So it should come as no surprise that the AJAX applications are more difficult to develop—and more difficult to load test. Fortunately, we're constantly thinking of ways to make AJAX performance testing as easy as possible.
Burst Grouping
One of the ways we make load testing AJAX easier is by using burst grouping for recording test cases. One of the big challenges in creating test cases is what to measure when there are asynchronous HTTP requests happening at random times. Our approach is to look for bursts of transactions that happen in response to user input, and measure the performance of those transactions together. With this approach, the events are measured from the user's perspective.
AJAX Load Testing Tutorial
While the interactive nature of AJAX does make it more difficult to test, Load Tester™ makes testing your AJAX application as easy as possible. Read the rest of this detailed AJAX testing tutorial explaining exactly how to load test the typical AJAX-style web application.
How does AJAX Affect Performance?
In this AJAX performance report Chris Merrill takes a look at what happens when you take a simple web application and re-implement it using AJAX.
"In applications that have a significant part of each page containing content that is identical in multiple page requests, using AJAX-style methods to update only the relevant parts of a web page can bring significant bandwidth savings. Using less than 100 lines of javascript, we were able to quickly convert an existing web application to use AJAX page-update methods to drastically reduce (>60%) the bandwidth requirements of our sample application."
Recent Original Articles
New JavaScript optimizer
From a load testing perspective, we are not generally concerned with Javascript performance – since it affects client-side rendering time and therefore has little relationship to load. However, we do see a lot of sites that could benefit greatly from improved Javascript performance – especially reducing the size of their Javascript files. Google has a relatively new project, Closure Compiler, that optimizes JavaScript code to reduce size and improve performance. If you’ve tried the Closure Compiler, give us a shout. We’d love to hear about your results! Chris Chief Engineer
How-To: Dynamic Field Names and Multi-Variable Extractors
Overview You’re recording test cases, configuring them, replaying them, and running load tests. One day, you attempt to test a new web application. However, every time you attempt to run a replay, the replay throws an extractor error; it is unable to find a field in the page content of the replay to extract. ASM configured this field automatically, so why isn’t it working? You look at the replay content … and the field name isn’t there. The usual culprit that causes this problem is a dynamic field name: a variable … Continue reading »
Performance Impacts of AJAX Development
Using AJAX to Improve the Bandwidth Performance of Web Applications Being a performance company, we are always interested in the impact of new development techniques on the performance of web applications. We have numerous customers who have performance problems due primarily to the size of their web pages. Put another way – the pages are simply too big to achieve the desired performance goals with the available bandwidth. In some cases, the page consists primarily of content that is common between many pages. For instance, a header, footer and navigation menu that … Continue reading »
