Load Testing Blog
Measuring Pagespeed and Customer Engagement
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 »
If you absolutely can not test your production system…
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 »
Load Testing a Website with Captcha
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 »
Google Pagespeed Scalability Benchmark
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 »
Setting Apache2 ulimit for Maximum Performance
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
Load Testing with IPv6 and the RackSpace Cloud
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 »
Load testing a website with IPv6 traffic
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 »
Load Testing with Virtual vs Real Browsers
Perhaps the most contentious issue in load testing today is whether to test with real or virtual browsers. Read through the issues and then leave a comment to let us know how you feel.
Which is More Real?
Load Tester PRO’s virtual browser recreates the HTTP data stream exactly as a real browser would, so from the server’s point of view it is identical to a real browser. For example, it automatically configures session tracking, cookies, and application state, just to name a few. The server is not aware that the HTML, images, and javascript it’s sending out are not actually … Continue reading »
Load Testing Mobile Websites for Android
Load Testing a mobile website has a few key differences from testing the full desktop-oriented version of a website. In this article, I will review those differences and show you how to use Load Tester to create testcases using the stock browser on Android 4 / ICS (the Ice-Cream Sandwich release).
This article does not cover the entire load testing process – I recommend checking out our videos and tutorials for more information on using Load Tester to run and analyze load tests.
Before I jump in, I want to give a quick introduction on how a load test is … Continue reading »
Handling Javascript and AJAX Callbacks
Overview
AJAX technologies present some special challenges for testing software – since it blurs the distinction between a traditional page-based web application and a rich client-server application. Most testing tools are specific to one or the other – and for very good reasons. This tutorial demonstrates one approach to handling AJAX callbacks in an AJAX-enabled web application using Web Performance Load Tester.
Prerequesites: This guide assumes a solid understanding of the Load Tester product. The Load Tester videos are a good introduction to the main features. It is assumed can record a testcase and exeute load tests using some of the … Continue reading »