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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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
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 »
Only need to run one or two load testing sessions a year? One cost-effective way to do occasional load testing is to rent licenses by the week or month. You can use the free demo to develop test cases, and then order the temporary license when you’re ready to start testing. Even customers who already own licenses find it convenient to rent Load Tester licenses with a larger number of virtual users to do testing of the installed software. The typical scenario is using a permanent license to test against the development or test system, and then rent a … Continue reading »
Durham, NC (PRWEB) June 14, 2010 — Web Performance announces major improvements with the new release of Load Tester 4.1. In addition to push-button cloud-based load testing, users can now quickly measure their bandwidth capacity using the Bandwidth Wizard, easily get immediate help from a Web Performance engineer with desktop-share help integration, and select from a wider range of Amazon cloud locations. The newly reorganized load testing reports include an executive summary and clearer graphs to make analysis even easier than before.
“I’m excited to get our new web bandwidth measurement feature into customer’s hands because it quickly solves … Continue reading »
No, Microsoft has not admitted that our load testing solution is superior…yet. We anticipate that announcement any day now :>
At last year’s Velocity conference, Microsoft’s Eric Schurman (working on Bing optimization) presented results of tests that Microsoft ran to measure the business impact of the performance of Bing, Microsoft’s newest search platform. Using an A-to-B test platform that directs a subset of their users to a dedicated testing system, they are able to directly observe the effect of specific changes to the performance of the Bing test site. They can collect and analyze a number of metrics about both subsets … Continue reading »
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