Load Testing Blog
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 »
Load Testing with 5,000,000 Concurrent Users
At Web Performance we’ve been running large scale tests for over a decade, the result of constant testing and measurement to make sure the results are valid. As websites get bigger, we’ve had to increase the size of our tests, creating thousands of computers in the cloud to generate up to 5,000,000 concurrent users at last count.
Introducing Web Performance Legion
I want to introduce you to something new: Web Performance Legion. Legion is a new open-source research product. It’s an attempt to create a powerful load testing tool that can handle difficult and or esoteric use cases while still being easy-to-understand at its core. It’s still in the early phases of development, but if you happen to love working with Node, or you need to test a complex RESTful API, Legion might be the tool for you.
Testing Popup Windows
We often receive questions about how Load Tester handles popup windows. In this post, I’ll describe how Load Tester handles these elements and provide a sample recording.
How does Load Tester Handle Popups?
Users do not regularly encounter popups. As a result, these windows may appear to function differently from regular browser windows.
However, when recording using a virtual browser, Load Tester records any calls to the server. Replaying a recording or running a test will replay those calls whether issued from a normal browser window or a popup.
NOTE: The following method is only applicable to “Virtual Browser” recordings.
Recording a Popup Window
1. On the … Continue reading »