The Velocity Conference is the biggest and best web performance event in the field, and completely eclipses the testing conferences that add in performance as an afterthought. Well, if truth be told its the only conference entirely on the subject, but that’s besides the point. The others might have a separate performance track, while this entire conference is devoted to building, testing, and operating high volume sites.
http://velocityconf.com/velocity2012
We’re a media partner this year, so if you’re thinking of attending be sure to use this 20% discount code: WEBPER. The conference has … Continue reading »
The 2012 car racing season got off to shaky start for our intrepid SpecE30 car and driver. The driver, Jason Tower, is still not back 100% after surgery to repair a torn ligament in his hand, but none-the-less headed to the Virginia International Raceway to try his luck at a weekend of SpecE30 racing.
The first race on Saturday was a disaster after a series of mishaps:
“… a car went off in turn 3 on the first lap which summoned the
emergency vehicles to the spot. The next time around another car
failed to see the yellow flag, … Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
