There is a new Load Testing 101 post over on the Dynatrace Blog. Overall, I think it is a pretty good article. However, it illustrates some of the fallacies of load testing that we hear from time to time. In this article, I want to dispel a fallacy that might be inadvertently reinforced by that post. Please note that I don’t want to speak for the authors – so I encourage you to read their article and judge their meaning for yourself.
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn into computers. … Continue reading »
We field a lot of questions about load testing websites with 3rd party components on the pages containing advertisements or user tracking mechanisms. For many of our users, we recommend leaving these out of the load test entirely. For some users this causes some concern over maintaining the realism of the load test. In this post, I’m going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of dealing with these in a load test – and then provide some quick instructions for easily keeping these services out of your load test.
I’ll start by looking at the possible advantages of including these services … Continue reading »
My first day at Velocity was long, but fun. I breathed a sigh of relief when my luggage finally arrived…10 hours after I did.
I attended part of a Load Testing workshop early in the afternoon that raised some interesting topics:
Why are steady ramps bad? They showed some examples of how this approach can result in the wrong conclusions about system capacity. I agreed heartily – I’ve blogged on the merits of a stepped ramp in load tests previously.
Abandonment rates – This is a feature that I’d like to get into Load Tester sooner rather than later. A basic … Continue reading »
Overview
You’re recording test cases, configuring them, replaying them, and running load tests. One day, you attempt to test a new web application. However, every time you attempt to run a replay, the replay throws an extractor error; it is unable to find a field in the page content of the replay to extract. ASM configured this field automatically, so why isn’t it working? You look at the replay content … and the field name isn’t there.
The usual culprit that causes this problem is a dynamic field name: a variable in a dynamic web page that not only changes in value, … Continue reading »
How long should my load test take? How quickly should the test ramp-up users? Is there a right answer, or a wrong one?
We are getting close enough to the 3.6 release that I’m able to talk more about the new features – so look for more posts in the next few days. I blogged previously about the improved performance goal features, but at the time, I could not detail how they would be used to improve Load Tester’s analysis reports.
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn into computers. 7 years later, after finishing his degree in Computer and Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, he found himself writing software for industrial control systems. … Continue reading »
As web applications become more sophisticated, configuration of testcases used to test the application becomes more difficult. The need for customization, beyond the automatic configuration provided in Load Tester, means that testers need to spend more time understanding the application. One common scenario finds the tester searching through the application pages to determine where a field is assigned, in order to configure a custom extractor to get the value dynamically. Several of the features added in Load Tester 3.6 makes this process much easier.
In the example below, the Search View is used to find a field with dropUsers in the … Continue reading »
Is your Sharepoint website slow? Are the servers under-utilized and the database shows no locking, but response times for the pages are still poor? Is Sharepoint unstable under load? We recently helped a client through the grueling process of optimizing and stabilizing a large Sharepoint installation. Once we discovered the underlying causes, the fixes were rather easy, but finding the performance bottlenecks was time consuming. We’ve described the process and the findings, so you can skip the hard part!
Read the case study.
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn into … Continue reading »
Customers frequently ask us for help deciding how many virtual users they need for their load tests. We have a number of formulas for calculating this, depending on what information the customer has available. Last weekend I built online calculators for a few of the more popular variations. Give them a try!
If these don’t apply to the data you have available, contact us and we’ll be happy to help you calculate the number of simulated users required for your specific needs!
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn into computers. 7 … Continue reading »
Enabling dynamic compression in IIS 7.0 can reduce the bandwidth usage on a particular file by up to 70%, but also reduces the maximum load a server can handle and may actually reduce site performance if the site compresses large dynamic files. Read the full report for a complete analysis.
matt