Load Testing Blog
Persistent Connections & Performance
Reaping performance benefits from using persistent connections on your HTTP web server is nothing new. In a recent test of a SSL site, one of our clients enabled persistent connections on their servers as part of a new deployment. The results were quite impressive: for a single user & negligible server utilization, page durations dropped from 12 seconds to only 3.5 seconds. Persistent connections can contribute to much of this duration difference by reducing the amount of time needed establish new connections. The use of SSL makes this feature even more important, as the SSL layer requires additional session negotiation. … Continue reading »
Why is my Page being Hit more than Once per View?
During testing of some sites, we found an strange case where pages seem to download themselves. What does this look like?
Note that the page gets requested, and seems to request itself while it is rendering. This has an obvious problem: the dynamic content is being requested twice as many times as necessary, causing the server to have to render it twice as often as necessary. If users turn off Load Tester’s “streaming” feature while recording, this looks a little different: the 2nd instance of the request is still made, but instead we get an error message: “Connection to server abandoned … Continue reading »
Checklist: Is your Load Test ready to run?
Here are a few quick pointers for checking your Load Test, to see if you are ready to run. Feel free to check back, as this list may be updated from time to time.
Test Planning:
Have the appropriate parties been notified of the test?
Do any of the servers have scheduled jobs during the test window? Automatic backups or other maintenance windows that are scheduled during normal down-time or idle-time can have surprising results during a high volume test.
Is the firewall going to be an issue? When using a small set of external IPs to generate load, make sure the firewall administrators … Continue reading »
Moving Load Tester™ To A New Computer
If you’ve installed Load Tester™ on a workstation, and are in the process of upgrading to a new workstation, you may be wondering how to move your Load Tester™ installation between the workstations. For version 4.0, this is not a difficult process, and generally can be completed in four steps:
Install a copy of Load Tester on your new workstation. New installers are available at www.webperformance.com/download
Copy the .WPT files from the old workstation (if they are not already saved on a network share). These files contain your recorded & configured testcases, as well as load test results.
Transfer your License … Continue reading »
Estimating Load test ramp-up times
How long should my load test take? How quickly should the test ramp-up users? Is there a right answer, or a wrong one?