Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “web performance”
Load Testing Back to Basics: Avoiding the KeepAliveTimeout Race Condition
You’ve recorded your test case, configured your datasets, and run your replays. You start up the load test and … you see numerous errors like this:
“The connection with the server was unexpectedly closed before starting the response.”
What’s going on? Well, one common reason for this error is a connection-related race condition between Load Tester and the web server due to the server’s configured persistent connection timeout.
Persistent connections are an HTTP mechanism for minimizing network connection overhead between the browser and the web server. If the client … Continue reading »
Microsoft Affirms the Importance of Web Performance
No, Microsoft has not admitted that our load testing solution is superior…yet. We anticipate that announcement any day now :>
At last year’s Velocity conference, Microsoft’s Eric Schurman (working on Bing optimization) presented results of tests that Microsoft ran to measure the business impact of the performance of Bing, Microsoft’s newest search platform. Using an A-to-B test platform that directs a subset of their users to a dedicated testing system, they are able to directly observe the effect of specific changes to the performance of the Bing test site. They … Continue reading »
What is “Web Bandwidth” and how do you test it?
When diagnosing performance problems with our clients websites, it is not uncommon for the bandwidth to come into question. Very often, the bandwidth chart will show a distinct plateau and it can be difficult to determine if this is cause or effect. This example shows outgoing server bandwidth (green) as the users (blue) ramp up. It could be interpreted as a bandwidth limitation around 8Mbps. In this case it is not – the limitation is elsewhere in the system.
It can be challenging to prove that bandwidth … Continue reading »
For Bell Canada, Early Performance Testing Spells Success
When Bell Canada began development of an important new customer-facing application, project lead Mr. Roger Bejjani knew he needed to find a web testing tool that would help fine-tune performance throughout the development process and into production. Having used Empirix (purchased by Oracle) and Load Runner (purchased by HP)in the past, he decided to forgo overpriced software and look for a tool that would give him the functionality he needed at a more reasonable price. The main requirement would be load testing HTTP and HTTPS requests, and the … Continue reading »
Load Testing Fallacies: The Test Scenarios Must Be Completely Accurate
Last time, I talked about why it is ok to start testing early in the development process. I’m going to continue that thought process to discuss load testing without complete performance requirements. This Load Testing 101 article says “If the real end user is going to do work with your application in a totally different way than you test you are as good as with no testing at all.” While there is a nugget of truth hidden in there, it is easy to take … Continue reading »
How User Ramping Works – Part One
How we add new virtual users to a test can be confusing when you’re first starting out with Load Tester, and sometimes can result in tests that do not ramp up to the number of users you expect or otherwise behave strangely.
User Capacity Analysis
How Many Users?
One of the most important goals of load testing is to find out how many users a particular website can handle simultaneously. For years, Load Tester has been the only product to give a direct, simple answer to that question. In the Load Tester 3.6 release the user capacity algorithm received a major overhaul, making the analysis more configurable, more flexible, and more accurate than ever before.
In this tutorial we’re going to look at some real-world load testing examples, and discover how user-capacity analysis tells us exactly how many users the … Continue reading »
Web Performance Load Tester 3.6 Gives Web Developers Easier, More Accurate Tests
New software includes click to configure test case development, visual performance indicators, user-level analysis and expanded compatibility with AJAX and .NET.
Durham, NC – May 7, 2009 – Web Performance, Inc. (WPI) released the most recent version of its industry-leading load testing application last week. Web Performance Load Tester version 3.6 includes a number of new features that make it even easier to use and more intuitive for its non-programmer user base.
One of the application’s most appealing new features is its use of visual … Continue reading »
Business Impacts of Performance
One of the opening sessions of the Velocity 2009 conference was a joint session with engineers from Microsoft Live Search (Bing) and Google Search…yes, they were together on the same stage :>
Both organizations wanted to measure the effects of performance on the business – i.e. on revenue. Revenue for search sites is based on the number of searches and on the number of clicks on results. Both of the search giants have experimentation platforms which allow them to send a small portion of real users to a different version of the search … Continue reading »
New Load Tester feature – web page performance goals
Load Tester has supported the concept of a performance goal for quite a while, but the implementation has been rather limited. We have completed work on an improved version for our next release (3.6). Load Tester now provides the ability to set a performance goal for each web page and/or transaction in a testcase individually. Of course, you can still specify a global page performance goal, as you could in the past. In addition, users can specify a default page (or transaction) duration goal for an entire … Continue reading »
