Load Testing Blog
3 Podium Finishes for the Web Performance Race Car
Web Performance is one of the sponsors, along with OpenNMS, of Jason Tower in his Spec E30 race car for 2010 and 2011. He’s consistently made progress as a driver, so that by the end of the season he was able to place third in all three races in October’s Great Pumpkin Run at the Carolina Motorsports Park!
A video of the first race is below, along with Jason’s blow-by-blow description:
“Saturday qualifying was smooth except for a GTS4 car that spun, I nabbed 5th of 17 cars with only a tenth of a second separating P3 and P5. … Continue reading »
Load Tester 4.3 Released!
Following closely on the heels of the previous release, the 4.3 release focuses on network compatibility and testcase configuration improvements based on feedback from customers and from our services work in the past year with such clients as the US Census and the New York Marathon.
JSON and custom parsers
JSON support – Load Tester now understands the JSON data format which is popular in AJAX apps. A new parser allows the fields view to display the fields within JSON data structures and new detection rules will automatically configure many JSON-related fields.
Parser customization: Load tester now allows selection of which parser to … Continue reading »
Cloud Load Testing Generator Now $1/hour
There’s no doubt that generating load from anyplace in the world at just the push of a button is one of the cloud’s killer applications. Since we first released the ability to generate load from the cloud back in late 2009 people have logged over 33,000 hours of remote load testing from the cloud. And not a crippled cheapo service, either, but full blown, enterprise quality testing with expert technical support backed by a professional services team.
I still get a kick out of running load tests from the cloud, specifically watching Amazon’s EC2 spin up dozens of computers and … Continue reading »
Monitor Unlimited Web Servers with Server Monitoring Modules
Now if you have even a single server monitoring license you can monitor an unlimited number of servers at no extra charge! The Server Monitoring modules are add-ons for Load Tester that add the ability to monitor a couple dozen different parameters from the Windows or Linux operating systems or the .NET application server. Previously they were licensed on a per-server basis, which meant a license had to be issued for each server, and customers who purchased a bunch had the hassle of managing a handful of licenses, each of which had to be installed and updated.
In … Continue reading »
Load Tester 4.2 Beta Released
One of the things that makes Web Performance software great is the tight cooperation between our load testing services and software developers. Our load testing engineers are always running over to the software engineers and begging for changes to make their lives easier, and the 4.2 beta is the first in a series of upgrades designed to put these internal upgrades into your hands.
One of the tasks that takes a load testing engineer a significant amount of time is configuring fields, the way that each virtual user can enter unique data during a testcase. Load Tester 4.2 includes an enhanced … Continue reading »
Load Testing Basics: How Many Concurrent Users is Enough?
How Many Users Can Your Website Handle?
Start running real load tests right now.
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The most common question regarding a website’s performance is not how fast the website is or how it scales, but something more fundamental:
What should the performance goal be in terms of concurrent users?
Should it be one hundred concurrent users? A thousand? Ten thousand? Does it require one server or a hundred to handle the load?
There’s a good reason for how many times this question comes up: it’s tricky and … Continue reading »
Web Performance at the Software Test Professionals Conference
Michael Czeiszperger, founder of Web Performance, Inc., will be speaking in the Performance Testing track at the upcoming Software Testing Professionals Conference March 22-24 in Nashville, TN. The talk is called Wishful Thinking and Poor Planning: Load Testing in the Real World, and is based on experience with over 590 clients. This session discusses how to deal with what actually happens in the real world of performance testing: ill-defined or non-existent customer requirements, truncated budgets and schedules, and mysterious crashes under load. This talk will outline the best ways to make sure a website meets all performance requirements despite … Continue reading »
Web Performance Race Car Wins BMWCCA Enduro at Road Atlanta!
Jason Tower pulled off TWO first place wins in September at Road Atlanta, both in strenuous ~90 minute enduro races that push both man and car to the limit. His previous races all season have been sprints, short races where you go all out for a short period of time. Enduros require the use of some strategy and pacing since it adds refueling and pit stops into the mix. All of us here at Web Performance, Inc. are proud of the progress he’s made all season, and its now showing up in not one, but TWO first place … Continue reading »
Load Tester™ Gives Nacon Consulting a 5x Performance Boost
NACON Consulting, provider of cyber security training solutions for the defense community, was aware of the concurrent user limitations of their online learning management system. In preparation for a major version release for an important client, COO Kent Leonard told his team that he wanted to see an improvement in performance, with documented proof that the system could not only handle the client’s required user load, but exceed it. “In my eighteen years of experience in IT development, I’ve found that testing is typically not as robust as it should be. I wanted to change that and do proper testing,” … Continue reading »
Load Testing: Software or Services?
One of the common questions our customers ask is: “should we buy software and do the load testing ourselves or hire someone to do it?”.
The question is one with few easy answers, but in this blog entry I’ll lead you through the thought process so you can decide which option is the best for your situation.
The first question to ask is how often do you need to do load testing? If you’re planning on testing more than twice a year its usually cost effective to purchase software and learn how to use it. This is true of … Continue reading »