Load Testing Blog
Web Performance Race Car Takes Third at the Charlotte Motor Speedway
The Charlotte Motor Speedway is perhaps better known for NASCAR, but recently it was host to the Web Performance car in the Spec E30 NASA Firecracker Run on July 2, 2010 where our where our rookie driver Jason Tower finished third for his first podium finish!
The two heat series started off on the right foot with Jason qualifying for second place, putting him on the front row for pacing before the green flag is thrown. The whole point of a spec class in the cars are as identical as possible, so this course is particularly interesting because … Continue reading »
Keeping Your Load Testing Cases Current (How To)
Maybe you’ve just finished your first crack at testing, handed some results up to the development team, and are just got a note that the dev team has revamped the site in preparation for the next test. Or maybe you completed testing last month and are ready to retest the site against any regressions. Are all the testcases setup from the last round of testing still going to work? Are you going to have to create all new testcases? Here are a few quick ways to find out:
1. Run a replay with your existing testcases. If the replay fails … Continue reading »
How to Get Your First and Second Jobs in the Tech Industry
First, this blog post is just my opinion based on my hiring experiences. Other hiring managers are sure to have other priorities, so take this advice with a grain of salt and use what you can. As a bit of background, I graduated in 1987 with an BSEE from The Ohio State University, and over the years have interviewed many job candidates, either directly hiring or giving my opinions on dozens of entry-level and senior candidates for programming, systems administration, and other positions. What this did is give me the opportunity to see correlations between how candidates presented themselves … Continue reading »
Velocity Web Performance Conference 2010 Day Two
Static vs. Dynamic Web Performance
Last week I attended Oreilly’s Velocity Conference in San Jose, the only conference solely dedicated to the subject of website performance and testing. It was sold out for the first time; many of the presentations were standing room only and I was unable to get a room at the hotel.
One distinction that I was disappointed that was overlooked is the difference between static and dynamic web performance. All of the performance issues in the presentations I heard were all related to static web page performance, which is how long a web page takes to … Continue reading »
Introduction to Load Testing: Part One
The website is completed or mostly completed and you have been advised to do a load test, but you are not quite sure were to begin. First things first, a basic understanding of load testing procedure is needed. The load testing procedure mostly involves understanding the web-application that will be tested. Understanding the applications refers to many different factors such as:
Understanding the functionality of the website.
Understanding the general network layout.
Understanding the software and hardware used by the system.
These factors are useful for a number of reasons, not only do they make the load testing process easier, but they can help … Continue reading »
Velocity Web Performance Conference 2010 Day One
Last week I was in San Jose at Oreilly’s Velocity Conference, the only conference solely dedicated to the subject of website performance and testing.
The first talk of the day was Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website, given by Sean Power, one of the authors of Complete Web Monitoring. He is an excellent speaker, and the talk was full of good information. These are my thoughts on the subjects he brought up, but includes quite a bit of my own extrapolations from his thoughts, and will try to make it clear which are which.
Sean’s … Continue reading »
Load Tester™ 4.1 Adds West-coast Cloud for Load Generation
The 4.1 release expands Load Tester’s cloud support by adding a third source for load generation – the Amazon EC2 USA West region. When added to the USA East and European Union regions, the combination supports generating massive amounts of load against websites in North American and Europe.
If you already have one or more cloud accounts configured in Load Tester, you simply add another account, provide the account credentials and select USA West from the region selection.
Chris Merrill, Chief Engineer
Load Testing Back to Basics: TCP Connection Failures
Load Tester is a web site load testing tool, and as such we deal primarily with the most popular Internet communications protocol: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, which controls the request and transmission of web pages between browser clients and web servers. HTTP is based on a lower-level protocol known as the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. For the most part, TCP works in the background, but its proper function is critical to your website, and problems at the TCP level can show up in many different ways during a load test. … Continue reading »
Faster Websites Are More Profitable
An experiment by a vendor of website accelerator appliances showed that optimization of website performance had a measurable improvement on visitor retention. Visitors to the optimized site:
had a 1% lower bounce rate
visited 4.5 more pages
spent 27% more time on the site
For the retail site they tested, the impact was felt on the bottom line:
conversion rate increased 16%
order value increased 5.5%
For details, read the full article: Proof that speeding up websites improves online business.
Chris, Chief Engineer
Simulated DNS Load Balancing Improves Testing Accuracy
With the release of Load Tester 4.1, we’ve been discussing some of the new features available in this release. One of those features is Simulated DNS Load Balancing. This feature offers improved testing accuracy over previous versions of Load Tester.
This feature is designed for systems which may use DNS to alias a single hostname to many different IP addresses, allowing the DNS system to provide load balancing. This works effectively when the users or load engines greatly outnumber the number of servers, and are well distributed and not in a common location. For users that wish to test their system … Continue reading »