With the advent of AJAX and one-page applications, the concent of a “web page” as a single file with HTML is antiquated. A simple website where the user navigates from page to page has morphed into a web-based application, with complicated user interface elements that aren’t web pages in the traditional sense.
And yet for testing purposes, we need to separate the different stages of a workflow for a web-based application. In Load Tester, then, the concent of a “page” could be anything from a traditional HTML file to a single asynchronous AJAX call. The common denominator is each “page” is … Continue reading »
The problem
Here is the situation: We are running a load test for a customer. The web servers are showing low to moderate CPU utilization and low disk activity. They have plenty of memory available. The middle-tier servers are reporting similar measurements. So is the database. Everything looks good in the load test.
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. His first foray into testing software resulted … Continue reading »
The process instead is to locate where the cookie value is set in javascript, parse the value, and set the cookie value inside the cookie store. The new cookie value is then updated in every subsequent transaction automatically.
Chronograf is a web-based GUI for visualizing time-series data, typically from a time-series database such as InfluxDB. I have been using it recently to store load-test measurements created by the MuseIDE Measurements extension.
I have been running it in the cloud, starting up a fresh instance whenever I have the need for storing load test results. This is handy and very cost-effective, but starting from scratch means that I need to set up dashboards of the metrics I want to see every time.
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn … Continue reading »
InfluxData offers a set of tools that are well-purposed for load testing:
InfluxDB is a time series database that is very good for storing measurements generated during load testing
Telegraf is a client that can report performance-related OS measurements to InfluxDB (CPU%, Memory%, bandwidth, network and disk I/O, etc). Useful for monitoring both the load generators and the servers.
Chronograf is a visualization tool for time-series databases – very handy for visualizing and analyzing load test measurements.
ChrisWhen his dad brought home a Commodore PET computer, Chris was drawn into computers. 7 years later, after finishing … Continue reading »
Even though interoperability has been conquered, browsers still want to compete on performance, so picking the fastest one is a reasonable question. But what does browser performance mean in a world in which many people now have 1 Gb/s network connections in their home, and a 4G LTE phone connection can go up to 173Mb/s?
Over the past two years, my employer, Web Performance, Inc, has supported my
work on the Legion Load Testing Framework when my other duties permit. The result has been a very flexible suite of software that has given us the ability to take on work that would otherwise be beyond the scope of our usual tools.
That being said. Legion remains experimental. Legion may be most appropriate for the unusual edge cases: proprietary, eccentric, or unusual protocols, or project requirements that other tools can’t handle, or if you want to write your load test using your own Node.js client APIs.
Legion absolutely … Continue reading »
What is Legion?
Legion is a distributed, protocol-agnostic load testing tool. You can learn more or get started with Legion on the legion-starter-pack GitHub page.
Why does it exist?
I wanted to create a tool that would solve the most challenging problems I’ve
encountered in my seven years of helping clients improve the performance,
capacity, and risk exposure of their network-enabled applications.
Those problems include:
Complexity of the use case or test design,
Unusual or proprietary protocols,
Requirements to scale beyond one million concurrent users,
Difficulty understanding or trusting the results of a test, and,
Difficulties with training new people on a given tool.
My hope is that Legion will eventually … Continue reading »
It has been 99 years since a solar eclipse has crossed the entire continental US, coast-to-coast. 14 states will be treated to 2½ minutes of total darkness by the August 2017 eclipse. I remember watching the partial solar eclipse of February 1979 in my school playground. I am (obviously) a little bit of a science geek, so when I got the assignment to load test the Eclipse Live 2017 site, I was excited. Besides the prestige, it’s really fun to be associated with a project that will be seen by millions, even in a minor role.
NASA hosts much of … Continue reading »
What Are You Installing?
For general information about the monitoring software check out the product information. The software is designed to be installed on production systems, and does not modify the registry or anything outside of the installation directory. The downside is that on Windows the software is not a service and must be started by hand before the test. There are two modes of working– either the statistics can be collected by hand from each server and emailed to our engineers, OR the firewall has to be modified to open two ports to connect to the monitor. Note that each server … Continue reading »