Load Testing Blog
It’s Always Nice to Hear…
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 »
StarEast Software Testing Conference – Day One
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 »
For Bell Canada, Early Performance Testing Spells Success
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 »
Large Load Tests on the Cheap
Need to generate thousands of concurrent users but don’t want to pay big bucks for a large license? You may not know that licenses to generate 1,000 or more concurrent users are available on a week-by-week basis. And now that Load Tester 4 can automatically generate massive amounts of load against data centers, leasing makes even more sense.
For existing customers, this means they can purchase a lower-level license for day-to-day use, and then just lease the larger licenses for a big final round of testing. We’ve had a tremendous response from existing customers who normally test with just a … Continue reading »
Designing for Scalability
I ran across this article yesterday. It is nearly two years old, but the content is still entirely relevant. If you are building a system that needs to scale out to handle a large load, then you’ve probably already read this or something similar…if not, then it is worth your time.
What is the relevance to Load Testing, you ask? In section 5 author, Simon Brown, says”
“… set measurable goals throughout the system, verify and measure the real performance and consider performance at all stages of the project.”
For a project manager, a key part of the job is reducing risk … Continue reading »
New JavaScript optimizer
From a load testing perspective, we are not generally concerned with Javascript performance – since it affects client-side rendering time and therefore has little relationship to load. However, we do see a lot of sites that could benefit greatly from improved Javascript performance – especially reducing the size of their Javascript files. Google has a relatively new project, Closure Compiler, that optimizes JavaScript code to reduce size and improve performance.
If you’ve tried the Closure Compiler, give us a shout. We’d love to hear about your results!
Chris
Chief Engineer
How User Ramping Works – Part Two
In part 1 of How User Ramping Works, we discussed how to set up a user ramp configuration for a test. When you’ve done that, recorded and replayed your test cases to perfection, loaded your datasets, configured your load engines, and set up your server agents, what actually happens when you push the big green button?
The first thing Load Tester does is go through a setup sequence that configures the load engines for the coming test. This can take a while, especially if you’ve configured large datasets or large numbers of files to be … Continue reading »
Load Testing for Software Developers
I ran across these slides that present an introduction to load testing for developers. Being primarily a developer myself, I thought it might be worth a read. It is pretty light – it would be nice to get a video with the entire presentation. But it does raise some good points that many developers can benefit from. I particularly liked that the author (Simon Brown) differentiated between performance and scalability – a difference that is easy to miss. He also points out that you cannot predict system performance, either from diagrams and charts or by extrapolating results from past … Continue reading »
Status code 200 didn’t match expected: 304
Suppose you’ve got a testcase that either worked in the past, or just works sometimes, but now seems to be giving you an error: “The status code of the response (200) did not match the status code of the response in the Testcase (304)”. This particular error message is probably not a serious error, but it usually means that your test isn’t quite emulating what a real browser would do.
Fixing this problem in Load Tester is usually easy. Just right click on your testcase, select Properties, and then go to the “Restart Options” tab. Simply check the last checkbox: “Update … Continue reading »
What is Load Testing?
Load test, performance test, stress test, soak test…there are numerous of terms to describe these efforts and even within the testing community there is not unanimous agreement. These definitions line up well with the most common usages:
Performance Testing – Any testing that is focused on measuring the performance of a system. This is in contrast to functional testing, which is primarily focused on measuring the correctness of the system. When you use a stopwatch to measure page load times in your browser, you are performance testing.
Load Testing – Performance testing with the goal of measuring the performance of a system … Continue reading »