Load Testing Blog
How to get a Quote for Load Testing Services
One of the first questions from customers interested in finding out the performance of their website is “how much will it cost?”. The main cost drivers for load testing are the number and complexity of the test cases, and the number and size (in concurrent users) of the test iterations. This blog post will explain how to describe your requirements and get an accurate cost estimate split into two types of charges: setup, and test iteration.
Setup Costs
The results of a load test are only as good as the quality of the test cases, but there is a large variation in … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.4: Now on OSX!
Note: This blog post rates high in Google searches, but is a couple of years out of date. Please read this for the latest on our OSX load testing software.
Hi, I’m Michael Czeiszperger, the original author of the Load Tester 1.0 and 2.0. Although Load Tester originally ran on OSX, 10 years ago the future of that platform was very much up for grabs, and with 99% of our sales on Windows, the OSX version was dropped. Fast forward to 2013, and I decided that 10 years of running Load Tester on my OSX machine through an emulator was 10 … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.4 Released!
Our goal with Load Tester 5.4 was to build the easiest to use load testing tool, even if you had no experience with load testing. It should just make sense when you look at it, with every button in the right place and all of the right information at your fingertips. We’ve spent most of 2013 reworking the user interface, trying out several different ways of doing the normal load testing workflow, until it both looked great and let us get load testing done as quickly as possible.
But of course, user interface improvements weren’t the only changes: we threw in … Continue reading »
Measuring Web Page Load Times using JMeter
At last count there were over 65 separate commercial load testing tools out there, but few with the name recognition of the open source program JMeter. Often people will call us up and ask to compare Load Tester with JMeter, but I only had a cursory look at it many years ago, and couldn’t speak from recent first-hand knowledge. So, when someone called me last week asking about JMeter, it seemed like a good opportunity to give it another look.
Web Performance Consulting
Measuring Pagespeed and Customer Engagement
Recently we started using Google Pagespeed here at webperformance.com, and one of the cool features you can do with it is split traffic, so half of your customers get no pagespeed, and the other half get pagespeed turned on. With this approach you can actually measure how pagespeed does across your entire site, as well as drill down and look at its effects on individual pages, or even divide performance by country or continent.
As you can see, the effects on our top four most popular pages were mixed. The most improved page was the list of product … Continue reading »
Load Tester PRO 5.3 Released
Web Performance Inc is proud to release Load Tester PRO/LITE 5.3, which focuses on usability. The biggest change you’ll notice is the completely redesigned test case table, with inline editing, undo, drag and drop, multi-select, and new replay layout. Drag and drop works with either individual transactions or entire web pages, and as you play with the new widget notice details such as inline editing and customizable table columns. Select a series of web pages or transactions, and right-click to edit think times or page load time goals. The new table is also customizable; right-click on … Continue reading »
Load Testing a Website with Captcha
More and more sites are having to add captcha security to thwart spam bots, making this a familiar sight:
But what happens when you need to do performance testing on such a site? One common question on our support line is how to configure a load testing tool to read the displayed text and type it in. The whole point of adding captcha security is to prevent an automated tool from accessing the website, so if it was easily bypassed by a load testing tool, then spammers could also use that same technique to access your website!
There … Continue reading »
Google Pagespeed 1.1 Performance with PHP
For the past week I’ve been testing out the performance of the new Google Pagespeed module for Apache, mod_pagespeed, and with the memory locking option turned on, the performance was a definite improvement for static pages. The fact is, though, there are much faster web servers for static content, and CDNs make scaling static pages very, every easy. Standard testing procedure, though, is to start as simple as possible, and test every variation separately. The next step, then is to test how Pagespeed works on dynamic pages.
As before, this new test uses our own corporate site, except now … Continue reading »
Google Pagespeed 1.1 Scalability with Memory Locking
In last week’s blog post looking at the overhead of running Google Pagespeed, there was a marked scalability penalty to be paid that was caused by an approximate doubling of CPU load. Several people suggested some options to try, the easiest of which was turning on an experimental memory locking option. (The default mod_pagespeed config uses file locking.) I was also informed as to the plethora of tuning options to tailor the behavior to each site, but decided to keep it simple and experiment with each option separately. As with Apache itself, there’s lots … Continue reading »
Google Pagespeed Scalability Benchmark
Premise
Google Pagespeed is an easy way to optimize web page rendering time without having to recode your website. The pagespeed analyzer gives suggestions on what needs to be changed, while mod_pagespeed is an Apache add-on that makes those modifications automagically.
The one question that hasn’t been answered is “what is the performance cost for installing mod_pagespeed”. Pagespeed addresses only client-side performance, which is completely different from server scalability. The actual page load times that customers see in practice is affected by both the page design and layout, and the actual speed of the server under load. … Continue reading »