Load Testing Blog
Spotting Problems the Easy Way with Load Tester 5 Visual Comparison
One of the most frustrating jobs of writing a testcase is figuring out what went wrong when the test gives you an error message. Other tools may give you terse error messages, indicating there is a problem with the page. Load Tester 5 now makes this easy an automatic with a quick Visual Content Compare tool.
Let’s take a look at an example testcase using a simple workflow:
User logs into a web site
The user selects a link on the greeting page
User logs out
When working with a dynamic web application like this, when a page changes, that’s OK. We expect the greeting … Continue reading »
Testing Auto-Scaling Servers with Load Tester 5.1
One of the easiest ways to create a system that keeps up with sudden increases in demand is to use auto-scaling systems offered by many cloud providers. The concept of bringing new systems online to handle demand is nothing new: this has also been used by CDNs for years to replicate high demand data to edge locations. Testing this type of system, however, can become more challenging when the auto-scaling relies on updating DNS records in order to route new users to new servers.
In Load Tester 5.0 and earlier, Load Tester could be set to Continue reading »
iPad or iPhone iOS Load Testing
With the rapid growth of tablets and smart phone purchases, the popularity of mobile browsers have increased significantly. Our own site has seen an increase in mobile traffic from 0.2% of two years ago, to 2.5% mobile traffic today. Due to the increase in popularity of mobile browsers, it is becoming essential to test the performance of your website on a mobile device as well.
Web Performance Load Tester records all the HTTP traffic between the browser and server through a transparent proxy, this allows for Load Tester to be flexible with the types of browsers that can be emulated during a … Continue reading »
Safari on New iPad 18% Faster than iPad 2
Thinking about getting the latest new iPad? One of the main activities for the iPad is web browsing, so we thought it would be fun to see how all three iPad models stacked up in the web page load time race.
Which Web Pages? These websites were picked for no particular reason other than we use them regularly and are likely representative of the browsing habits of a large number of our readers.
www.amazon.com
www.apple.com
www.facebook.com
www.microsoft.com
www.wikipedia.org
www.yahoo.com
Static vs. Real-World Testing
Typically browser performance is reported by running static benchmark tests that measure in a highly controlled way with few variables. Unfortunately, when you or I … Continue reading »
Why you should not cheat on VUs
Because load testing tools are usually priced by the number of simultaneous users it can generate, it is common to use fewer VUs (virtual users) than called for by the test plan. To compensate, testers may lower the think time (the time between pages) in order to move VUs more quickly through the testcases and achieve a higher transaction rate than actual users would produce. The transaction rate may also be increased by raising the simulated per-user bandwidth – again to speed the lower number of VUs through the testcases more quickly. The system capacity must then be extrapolated based … Continue reading »
Simplified pricing for Load Tester 5
Short version:
The pricing for Load Tester 5 has been simplified down to a single price for Load Tester 5, along with a handful of options. Easy to understand, easy to afford, easy to buy!
Long version (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love simple pricing):
We have always tried to make Load Tester easy to understand and easy to buy. Part of that effort was to offer flexible pricing based on what customers needed. Over the years, we increased the number of price tiers, added a variety of permanent, floating and temporary licenses. Somewhere along the way, our price … Continue reading »
Generating 1,000,000 Concurrent Users with Load Tester 5
Can Load Tester really generate 1,000,000 concurrent users? Many of our existing customers have run tests in the 20,000-50,000 range. With previous versions of Load Tester and some internal tools, our services group has run tests as large 600,000 VUs. But none of these tests really pushed Load Tester to it’s limits. We’ve engineered Load Tester from the start to scale, and scale big. All indications made us confident that our load generation infrastructure could scale far beyond any test we had run. However, the UI was not quite up to the task. Controlling the large number of load engines … Continue reading »
HowTo: Generate 1 Million Virtual Users with Load Tester 5.0 PRO
Leading up to the release of Load Tester 5.0, the Web Performance development team focused heavily on improving our capability to run massive load tests. Today, Load Tester 5.0 is specifically engineered to deliver as many as 1 million virtual users while controlling 500 remote load engines.
This is a “how to” article for Load Tester 5.0 users wanting to run their own massive load tests.
Before you Start
There are a few things you absolutely need. First and foremost is a modern workstation for the controller. By modern, I mean a 64-bit architecture with at least 7 GB of working memory. … Continue reading »
XML automation support in Load Tester PRO 5
In Load Tester 4.2 we added a new fields view with vastly expanded options to configure each field. In Load Tester 4.3 we added support for JSON as well as ad-hoc custom regular expression and name-value delimited parsers. In Load Tester 5, we are adding support for XML automation. Hierarchical XML data structures that appear in form fields or as HTTP POST content will appear in the fields view, and Load Tester’s application state management (ASM) tool will automatically assign any XML value or attribute for which it can identify an appropriate data source.
Each XML field will be named after … Continue reading »
Utilize Monitoring Tools During the Load Tests
Load testing tools will report the performance of the system from the end-user perspective – i.e. how long pages take to load in the browser. This information crucial for determining if the site has a performance problem, but does not give a complete picture – it does not tell you why the site is slow. For that, you need performance data from your servers. This will allow you to, for example, correlate periods of slow response time to periods of high CPU utilization. Or find that the number of connections to the database server rises dramatically right before a flurry … Continue reading »