Load Testing Blog
Introducing the Parallel extension for MuseIDE
Executing a load test implies running many tests at the same time…making this ability a crucial part of my work to add load testing capabilities to the Muse Test Framework and MuseIDE. This extension provides just that feature – running multiple tests in a test suite in parallel. After all, a load test is really just a test suite executed with a high level of parallelism and additional (performance) goals.
Measurements extension 0.2 released
The Measurements extension adds performance measurement features to tests developed with the MuseIDE. The 0.2 release adds several new plugins that are crucial to our goal of using Muse for load testing: Periodic Measurement Collector, Store Measurements to Local Filesystem, Store Measurements to CSV and the Step Measurements Producer.
What is the Fastest Web Browser in 2018?
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?
Legion: Status, and Future Plans
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 »
The Case for Legion
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 »
Load Testing for the 2017 Eclipse
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 »
Server Monitoring Instructions for Services Customers
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 »
Support added for cloud engines in 5 more Amazon AWS EC2 regions
Load Tester now has support for the 4 newest AWS regions: Ohio, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Seoul and Mumbai.
Starting with the 6.6.14774 release, you will now be able to generate load from these regions using our built-in cloud engine support. You’ll need an AWS account, of course.
Unfortunately, not all of the new regions support the instance sizes that Load Tester supports:
Mumbai is missing m3.medium and c3.large
Sao Paulo is missing m3.medium and c3.large
Ohio is missing m3.medium and t2.micro
Unfortunately, m3.medium is the size used by default in Load Tester, when starting cloud engines manually or automatically. So some care is required when using … Continue reading »
Installing Load Testing Software
Network setups and application designs vary from user to user and deciding how to implement Load Tester can be difficult. By understanding how Load Tester™ may be deployed within various environments, you’ll be able to more easily test and optimize your systems.
Upgrading repositories from 6.5 to 6.6
I’m more than a little proud that we have been able to keep our repository format backwards-compatible for the entire life of the product, with only a few minor bumps along the road. Unfortunately, that streak has come to an end. Thanks an oversight on my part in reviewing the compatibility of a 3rd-party library, some 6.5 repositories cannot be upgraded to 6.6 without some effort on your part.
TLDR: If you don’t use real-browser testcases, you get a pass – just upgrade as usual. Otherwise, before installing 6.6, open your repositories in 6.5 and delete all replays and load test … Continue reading »