Load Testing Blog
Load Tester PRO 5.3 Released
Web Performance Inc is proud to release Load Tester PRO/LITE 5.3, which focuses on usability. The biggest change you’ll notice is the completely redesigned test case table, with inline editing, undo, drag and drop, multi-select, and new replay layout. Drag and drop works with either individual transactions or entire web pages, and as you play with the new widget notice details such as inline editing and customizable table columns. Select a series of web pages or transactions, and right-click to edit think times or page load time goals. The new table is also customizable; right-click on … 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 »
Load Tester 5.2 Released
Yesterday we released Load Tester 5.2. This release contained a handful of UI improvements intended to improve the experience for first-time users. There are no changes in capabilities for PRO users in this version, so new license keys will not be issued except upon request. Don’t worry – the 5.3 release is coming right on its heels with some big UI improvements that we know all of our users will appreciate!
LITE users, however, will see a very big change in the 5.2 release compared with 5.1. This change both adds and subtracts important features to the LITE version. As a … Continue reading »
Google Pagespeed 1.1 Performance with PHP
For the past week I’ve been testing out the performance of the new Google Pagespeed module for Apache, mod_pagespeed, and with the memory locking option turned on, the performance was a definite improvement for static pages. The fact is, though, there are much faster web servers for static content, and CDNs make scaling static pages very, every easy. Standard testing procedure, though, is to start as simple as possible, and test every variation separately. The next step, then is to test how Pagespeed works on dynamic pages.
As before, this new test uses our own corporate site, except now … Continue reading »
Google Pagespeed 1.1 Scalability with Memory Locking
In last week’s blog post looking at the overhead of running Google Pagespeed, there was a marked scalability penalty to be paid that was caused by an approximate doubling of CPU load. Several people suggested some options to try, the easiest of which was turning on an experimental memory locking option. (The default mod_pagespeed config uses file locking.) I was also informed as to the plethora of tuning options to tailor the behavior to each site, but decided to keep it simple and experiment with each option separately. As with Apache itself, there’s lots … 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 »