Many of our customers want to run tests off-hours to minimize collateral inconveniences. For example, if the rest of your QA team is working on the same test server as you, it might behoove you to run a load test at 2:00 AM when the team is asleep. Load Tester has had the ability to schedule off-hours tests for years, but the feature remains a frequently asked question among potential testers.
In Load Tester 5.4’s streamlined user interface, you can schedule a test from the ‘Control’ menu by choosing “Schedule Load Test.” A “Scheduled Operation” dialog will appear, and you can … Continue reading »
One of the common questions people are interested in is finding out how much a test is going to cost. There are a lot of factors that go into this equation, such as getting an appropriately sized testing license, configuring a test server environment, reserving hardware for Load Engines, and bandwidth costs between the Load Engines and the content delivery servers (such as a CDN or origin servers). Let’s take a look at just how we might calculate the bandwidth charges that are involved in a single test.
If your site is only needs to support a few hundred users, then … Continue reading »
At last count there were over 65 separate commercial load testing tools out there, but few with the name recognition of the open source program JMeter. Often people will call us up and ask to compare Load Tester with JMeter, but I only had a cursory look at it many years ago, and couldn’t speak from recent first-hand knowledge. So, when someone called me last week asking about JMeter, it seemed like a good opportunity to give it another look.
Web Performance Consulting
Recently we started using Google Pagespeed here at webperformance.com, and one of the cool features you can do with it is split traffic, so half of your customers get no pagespeed, and the other half get pagespeed turned on. With this approach you can actually measure how pagespeed does across your entire site, as well as drill down and look at its effects on individual pages, or even divide performance by country or continent.
As you can see, the effects on our top four most popular pages were mixed. The most improved page was the list of product … Continue reading »
In my last post in this series, I asserted that you must test your production system and then promptly dismissed all the popular reasons for not doing so. But in the real world, things aren’t so simple. There will be cases where the production system can not be tested – for example, because test data can not be effectively purged from the system without a significant investment.
So, if you are in that situation, what can you do? If you cannot test your production environment, then you must recreate the production environment as precisely as possible. Every place that the … Continue reading »
More and more sites are having to add captcha security to thwart spam bots, making this a familiar sight:
But what happens when you need to do performance testing on such a site? One common question on our support line is how to configure a load testing tool to read the displayed text and type it in. The whole point of adding captcha security is to prevent an automated tool from accessing the website, so if it was easily bypassed by a load testing tool, then spammers could also use that same technique to access your website!
There … Continue reading »
Premise
Google Pagespeed is an easy way to optimize web page rendering time without having to recode your website. The pagespeed analyzer gives suggestions on what needs to be changed, while mod_pagespeed is an Apache add-on that makes those modifications automagically.
The one question that hasn’t been answered is “what is the performance cost for installing mod_pagespeed”. Pagespeed addresses only client-side performance, which is completely different from server scalability. The actual page load times that customers see in practice is affected by both the page design and layout, and the actual speed of the server under load. … Continue reading »
As strange as it seems, when you start up the standard RedHat or CentOS release, it is not configured for running Apache2 with any sort of performance! In fact, even on a large server you’ll be lucky to handle 100 concurrent users on even simple web pages. So many websites have very few visitors so often its not noticeable, but even if you adjust all of the other apache2 settings, if you don’t bother to adjust the ulimits, the site will be handicapped by really bad performance.
Web Performance Consulting
Over in this post, I showed how easy it is to configure IPv6 load testing in Load Tester — it’s all very easy with the possible exception of this part: “you need a load engine with IPv6 connectivity”. If you don’t have IPv6 connectivity from your location with sufficient bandwidth for testing or you need to test from another location, then you will access to a load generator (we call them load engines) with an IPv6 connection. Surprisingly, this can still be a challenge. Indeed, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that our own cloud engines don’t support IPv6 … Continue reading »
Are your apps ready for IPv6 users? Many organizations have started to support access to their applications via IPv6 addresses, and along with that comes the need to include IPv6 traffic in the load test plan. Indeed, we recently tested our customer portal to be sure it was accessible via IPv6 (it is – the application is deployed on Google’s AppEngine infrastructure, which includes IPv6 accessibility baked-in).
Of course, before you get to load testing, you should start with a basic connectivity check to ensure your website is accessible from IPv6 routes – you can use a tool such as … Continue reading »