Load Testing Blog
StarEast Software Testing Conference – Day One
I’m in Orland this week attending the 2010 StarEast conference for software testing, and was surprised at how much hadn’t changed. Its been over a decade since my last tech conference, and while the names have changed, the actual recommended practices haven’t changed much at all. Speakers are still preaching the values of early testing, automated test suites, and automated build processes that I learned as a young engineer at Sun Microsystems 20 years ago, but now they’re called “agile” and “ATDD“.
The only controversial statement of the day was in Jeff Payne’s opening keynote, where … Continue reading »
Designing for Scalability
I ran across this article yesterday. It is nearly two years old, but the content is still entirely relevant. If you are building a system that needs to scale out to handle a large load, then you’ve probably already read this or something similar…if not, then it is worth your time.
What is the relevance to Load Testing, you ask? In section 5 author, Simon Brown, says”
“… set measurable goals throughout the system, verify and measure the real performance and consider performance at all stages of the project.”
For a project manager, a key part of the job is reducing risk … Continue reading »
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 »
Next Generation Testing: no test plan required
So you’ve got a shiny new site designed and ready for testing. You may get some questions like: who are your users, and what will they do while on your site? Sometimes questions like these can be answered with analytics, sometimes with educated guessing. However, for those who can’t answer these simple questions, some options still remain. Among those, one option may soon be a reality: monkeys – lots of monkeys.
In the past, deploying monkeys has been somewhat problematic, as it required extensive training to keep them stationary while using a keyboard & mouse while using computer. This limitation may … 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 »
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 »
How User Ramping Works – Part One
How we add new virtual users to a test can be confusing when you’re first starting out with Load Tester, and sometimes can result in tests that do not ramp up to the number of users you expect or otherwise behave strangely.