Virtual Server Load Testing
Virtualization has changed the nature of systems architecture forever, bringing unparalleled flexibility and scalability, but also more points of failure. Load Tester PRO™ is perfect for testing your virtualized web-based application, and in fact, our load testing services division regularly tests virtualized architectures.
Bootstrapping an Alpine EC2 instance for Ansible and Docker
One of the challenges in running a large load test is the orchestration of a large number of machines to generate load. This involves a series of steps: Creating the instances Install the load testing software Sending the test configuration Run the test Collect test results Shutdown the instances Load Tester does that pretty effortlessly in EC2 – our customers as well as our own test engineers love not having to worry about those steps. It just works. As I evolve our next generation of testing tools, I am revisiting this problem and looking at solutions from a different angle. Last week, I decided to investigate … Continue reading »
Performance Goals and Analysis Methods
We are getting close enough to the 3.6 release that I’m able to talk more about the new features – so look for more posts in the next few days. I blogged previously about the improved performance goal features, but at the time, I could not detail how they would be used to improve Load Tester’s analysis reports. The ability to set global page and transaction goals and override them individually for each page or transaction is a nice feature, as is the appearance of the goals on the performance charts. But the real value comes from Load Tester automatically … Continue reading »
Load Testing A Web Application Running in a Virtual Machine
Determining the CPU cost of virtualization with VMware ESX The performance of our reference application under load (a default SugarCRM installation) on a virtualized server showed a 14% decrease, measured by total system capacity, compared to the same system running natively on equivalent hardware. Read the report
Load Testing a Virtual Web Application
Measuring the Performance Impact of Virtualizing a Web Application Server Virtualization is hot. Over the past few months, it would be difficult to pick an IT magazine out of my stack that does not have an article on Virtualization. Even in our small company, we have two VMware servers. This allowed us to reduce 9 underutilized servers down to two physical machines. Because the original severs were severely underutilized, the virtualized servers actually perform better (running on newer hardware). They are easier to manage – especially for backups. We have reduced the risk of configuration changes, software installs and upgrades by … Continue reading »