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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
We know we’ve got great people working here…but we still love it when a customer takes time out of their busy days to compliment one of them. After some recent on-site training and performance tuning for a local customer, George Terrone, President of Integrated Technical Services, wrote to tell us this:
Matt did an absolutely fantastic job. And the timing of his engagement could not have been better. He not only helped our customer understand your product better – he helped to solve a serious Apache problem that had stymied us all.
His Apache expertise – and his attitude – were both … Continue reading »
I’m in Orland this week attending the 2010 StarEast conference for software testing, and was surprised at how much hadn’t changed. Its been over a decade since my last tech conference, and while the names have changed, the actual recommended practices haven’t changed much at all. Speakers are still preaching the values of early testing, automated test suites, and automated build processes that I learned as a young engineer at Sun Microsystems 20 years ago, but now they’re called “agile” and “ATDD“.
The only controversial statement of the day was in Jeff Payne’s opening keynote, where … Continue reading »
When Bell Canada began development of an important new customer-facing application, project lead Mr. Roger Bejjani knew he needed to find a web testing tool that would help fine-tune performance throughout the development process and into production. Having used Empirix (purchased by Oracle) and Load Runner (purchased by HP)in the past, he decided to forgo overpriced software and look for a tool that would give him the functionality he needed at a more reasonable price. The main requirement would be load testing HTTP and HTTPS requests, and the software needed to be easy to use during development as well as … Continue reading »
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