Load Testing Blog
Load Testing for Software Developers
I ran across these slides that present an introduction to load testing for developers. Being primarily a developer myself, I thought it might be worth a read. It is pretty light – it would be nice to get a video with the entire presentation. But it does raise some good points that many developers can benefit from. I particularly liked that the author (Simon Brown) differentiated between performance and scalability – a difference that is easy to miss. He also points out that you cannot predict system performance, either from diagrams and charts or by extrapolating results from past … Continue reading »
What is Load Testing?
Load test, performance test, stress test, soak test…there are numerous of terms to describe these efforts and even within the testing community there is not unanimous agreement. These definitions line up well with the most common usages:
Performance Testing – Any testing that is focused on measuring the performance of a system. This is in contrast to functional testing, which is primarily focused on measuring the correctness of the system. When you use a stopwatch to measure page load times in your browser, you are performance testing.
Load Testing – Performance testing with the goal of measuring the performance of a system … Continue reading »
Configuring and Analyzing Performance Goals
This tutorial will show you how you can use performance goals to customize the reports to give you information that is relevant to the individual performance requirements of your system. The goal is to help you learn to draw better conclusions from the data and get more accurate results. You’ll also spend less time poring through the data.
Should we outsource load testing or do it ourselves?
We get this question a lot. I would really like to give an easy answer to that question. But since the answer depends heavily on the nature of your organization and the testing demands, I’m instead going to list some of the issues that we consider when helping our customers make these decisions.
Schedule – are you in a hurry? If you have an impending deadline and the performance testing needs to be completed immediately, then outsourcing may be the best choice. With an experienced partner, the first load test can be completed in less than a week. If the schedule … 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 away the wrong understanding.
One interpretation of that statement would be that “you must have … Continue reading »
How To: Run a Load Test to rule out Bandwidth Limitations
Bandwidth can be critical to the performance of a website. Since this is a rather obvious fact, it is common for our customers to watch for bandwidth as the limiting factor early in a testing effort. This is especially true when the load test results do not point immediately any other limitation, such as 100% CPU on the application server.
When faced with a poorly performing system but no obvious signs of limitations, it is natural to focus all energies on finding the cause of the problem. This might mean spending hours poring through firewall and router configurations, looking for anything … Continue reading »
User Capacity Analysis
How to measure the maximum capacity of your website in terms of concurrent users.
Using Elastic IPs with Amazon EC2 cloud-based load engines
Amazon’s Elastic IPs provide an easy way to assign a fixed IP address to cloud-based load engines – which would typically have a different IP address each time one is created.
Solving Server Problems with the Waiting Users and Average Wait Time Metrics
Learn how to diagnose the tricky situation where a server periodically hangs on pages.
User-Level Analysis of Performance Results
By analyzing data against applied user levels, rather than only against elapsed time, Load Tester permits better understanding of performance and of capacity.