Load Testing Blog
Discounted Advanced Server Analysis Licenses Now Available for Lease
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 »
Load Tester 4.1 Brings Web Bandwidth Measurement to Load Testing
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 »
Microsoft Affirms the Importance of Web Performance
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 »
Custom Report Logo in Load Tester™ 4.1
Load Tester 4.1 has a new feature that will be much-appreciated by our many customers who use Load Tester to provide load testing services to their clients. You can now customize the load test report with your own logo image!
Load Tester’s default report logo looks like this:
If you press the Settings button in the report viewer and then select the Report Settings tab, you will find you can choose any image to replace our logo (we recommend an image size of 200×60 pixels):
After accepting that change, the report will show the image you have chosen:
Note that when you change the … Continue reading »
Performance Lessons at the Virginia International Raceway
Web Performance, Inc. is a sponsor of Jason Tower’s Spec E30 racing season this year, and he invited me to Virginia International Raceway to check out our logo on his car, and to try my hand at driving on the track in a HPDE (High Perforformance Driver’s Education) event sponsored by the Tarheel Sports Car Club. As you can see above, the logo looks great on his car alongside the logos of several other local tech. companies.
My hopes of driving Jason’s race car at high speed were dashed when I was told that … Continue reading »
What is “Web Bandwidth” and how do you test it?
When diagnosing performance problems with our clients websites, it is not uncommon for the bandwidth to come into question. Very often, the bandwidth chart will show a distinct plateau and it can be difficult to determine if this is cause or effect. This example shows outgoing server bandwidth (green) as the users (blue) ramp up. It could be interpreted as a bandwidth limitation around 8Mbps. In this case it is not – the limitation is elsewhere in the system.
It can be challenging to prove that bandwidth is the problem. If the bandwidth is not reaching the known limits (i.e. what … Continue reading »
Keeping your HOSTS files in sync with Load Tester 4.1
Load Tester 4.1 has a number of exciting new features, but in this post, let’s discuss one of the less obvious features: a hosts file which is automatically synchronized with all your Load Engines.
Consider how often this happens: the development environment is mirrored from your production environment, and then updated to an internal version of the application, ready for testing. Since the development environment is otherwise a mirror of the production system, it is configured with the same virtual hostnames as your production environment, and / or it may share the same SSL certificates which identify it with the hostname … Continue reading »
Load Testing tips for Database Administrators
Nearly every useful web application is backed by some sort of database – usually a relational database. Many database administrators (DBAs) have never participated in a load-testing campaign and are sometimes even considered tangential to the load testing process.
However, your DBA is a crucial part of the load-testing team. In addition to the obvious skills of database performance analysis and tuning, the DBA brings other advantages to the project:
insight into how the application interacts with the database that may not be obvious from the perspective of other team members
ability to quickly backup and restore various database snapshots to increase consistency … Continue reading »
Load Engine Tuning: JVM Memory Optimization
The Web Performance load engine is the software Load Tester uses to create virtual users and generate load on the target. As with Load Tester, the load engine is a Java-based application that runs on its own Java virtual machine, which is included in the installation. There are two places the load engine is used: the local engine, which is included with Load Tester and runs inside the Load Tester JVM; and the remote engine, which is a standalone installation with its own JVM. The local engine is limited and intended mainly for replays and small tests, so in this … Continue reading »
Is your Load Balancer increasing your Bandwidth usage?
Is your load balanced website using more bandwidth under load than a single server would? In a previous article (“Status code 200 didn’t match expected: 304”), we discussed how a website may return full data content back to a client, even when the browser had the resource cached. If you believed that adding an extra server and a load balancer will increase your performance, this can be an unsettling surprise. The problem arises when two web servers are delivering different Entity Tags for the same static resource:
In this example, we have two requests made to the same public URL, … Continue reading »