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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
As strange as it seems, when you start up the standard RedHat or CentOS release, it is not configured for running Apache2 with any sort of performance! In fact, even on a large server you’ll be lucky to handle 100 concurrent users on even simple web pages. So many websites have very few visitors so often its not noticeable, but even if you adjust all of the other apache2 settings, if you don’t bother to adjust the ulimits, the site will be handicapped by really bad performance.
Web Performance Consulting
Perhaps the most contentious issue in load testing today is whether to test with real or virtual browsers. Read through the issues and then leave a comment to let us know how you feel.
Which is More Real?
Load Tester PRO’s virtual browser recreates the HTTP data stream exactly as a real browser would, so from the server’s point of view it is identical to a real browser. For example, it automatically configures session tracking, cookies, and application state, just to name a few. The server is not aware that the HTML, images, and javascript it’s sending out are not actually … Continue reading »
A recent Microsoft security advisory and subsequent patch unfortunately disabled SSL recording with Internet Explorer on all released versions of Web Performance Load Tester, Load Tester PRO, and Trainer. SSL recording with Firefox was not affect, but other browsers have not yet been tested.
If you have a current support contract you can update any 5.0 or later release by using Help->Software Updates, and selecting “Search for updates of currently installed features”. Follow the instructions to install patch 5.1.111161. If you have a current support contract, but have not yet upgraded to to 5.0 the most recent installer … Continue reading »
Overview
AJAX technologies present some special challenges for testing software – since it blurs the distinction between a traditional page-based web application and a rich client-server application. Most testing tools are specific to one or the other – and for very good reasons. This tutorial demonstrates one approach to handling AJAX callbacks in an AJAX-enabled web application using Web Performance Load Tester.
Prerequesites: This guide assumes a solid understanding of the Load Tester product. The Load Tester videos are a good introduction to the main features. It is assumed can record a testcase and exeute load tests using some of the … Continue reading »
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