Load Testing Blog
Going to the Velocity Conference in June? Save 20%
The Velocity Conference is the biggest and best web performance event in the field, and completely eclipses the testing conferences that add in performance as an afterthought. Well, if truth be told its the only conference entirely on the subject, but that’s besides the point. The others might have a separate performance track, while this entire conference is devoted to building, testing, and operating high volume sites.
http://velocityconf.com/velocity2012
We’re a media partner this year, so if you’re thinking of attending be sure to use this 20% … Continue reading »
2012 Racing Season Starts with a Crash
The 2012 car racing season got off to shaky start for our intrepid SpecE30 car and driver. The driver, Jason Tower, is still not back 100% after surgery to repair a torn ligament in his hand, but none-the-less headed to the Virginia International Raceway to try his luck at a weekend of SpecE30 racing.
The first race on Saturday was a disaster after a series of mishaps:
“… a car went off in turn 3 on the first lap which summoned the
emergency vehicles to the spot. … Continue reading »
How do you want to buy Load Testing software?
We are taking a fresh look at how load testing is priced and sold, and would really appreciate your help. If you could just take 2 minutes and answer this short, 3 question survey, your name will be entered into a drawing for a new iPad, to be awarded on Friday, April 27th.
Spotting Problems the Easy Way with Load Tester 5 Visual Comparison
One of the most frustrating jobs of writing a testcase is figuring out what went wrong when the test gives you an error message. Other tools may give you terse error messages, indicating there is a problem with the page. Load Tester 5 now makes this easy an automatic with a quick Visual Content Compare tool.
Let’s take a look at an example testcase using a simple workflow:
User logs into a web site
The user selects a link on the greeting page
User logs out
When working with a … Continue reading »
Testing Auto-Scaling Servers with Load Tester 5.1
One of the easiest ways to create a system that keeps up with sudden increases in demand is to use auto-scaling systems offered by many cloud providers. The concept of bringing new systems online to handle demand is nothing new: this has also been used by CDNs for years to replicate high demand data to edge locations. Testing this type of system, however, can become more challenging when the auto-scaling relies on updating DNS records in order to route new users to new servers.
In Load Tester 5.0 and earlier, … Continue reading »
Recording Testcases on Mobile Devices
With the rapid growth of tablets and smart phone purchases, the popularity of mobile browsers have increased significantly. Our own site has seen an increase in mobile traffic from 0.2% of two years ago, to 2.5% mobile traffic today. Due to the increase in popularity of mobile browsers, it is becoming essential to test the performance of your website on a mobile device as well.
Web Performance Load Tester records all the HTTP traffic between the browser and server through a transparent proxy, this allows for Load Tester to be flexible with the … Continue reading »
Safari on New iPad 18% Faster than iPad 2
Thinking about getting the latest new iPad? One of the main activities for the iPad is web browsing, so we thought it would be fun to see how all three iPad models stacked up in the web page load time race.
Which Web Pages? These websites were picked for no particular reason other than we use them regularly and are likely representative of the browsing habits of a large number of our readers.
www.amazon.com
www.apple.com
www.facebook.com
www.microsoft.com
www.wikipedia.org
www.yahoo.com
Static vs. Real-World Testing
Typically browser performance is reported by running static benchmark tests that measure … Continue reading »
Domain Ownership Verification with Load Tester LITE™
We’re very proud to have released a shiny new Load Tester LITE™, allowing users to load test their own servers, for free.
Load Tester LITE™ does have some restrictions, one of which being that you must verify that you own a server in order to run Load Tests against it. This process is referred to as Domain Ownership Verification. This process is not required for servers accessed through private IP ranges. Additionally, users with Load Tester PRO™ are not required to provide ownership verification.
When Load … Continue reading »
Why you should not cheat on VUs
Because load testing tools are usually priced by the number of simultaneous users it can generate, it is common to use fewer VUs (virtual users) than called for by the test plan. To compensate, testers may lower the think time (the time between pages) in order to move VUs more quickly through the testcases and achieve a higher transaction rate than actual users would produce. The transaction rate may also be increased by raising the simulated per-user bandwidth – again to speed the lower number of VUs through the … Continue reading »
Introducing Load Tester LITE™
We frequently hear this question from customers during the evaluation/purchase process: “How do I know if Load Tester can generate the load I need?” We knew that question would be even more common when we released Load Tester 5, because it allows users to load test 1 million users. So to answer this question, we created a new version of Load Tester.
Load Tester LITE™ allows unlimited load generation for free. It has been suggested that LITE is a poor name for a load testing tool that can generate enough load to … Continue reading »
