Reaping performance benefits from using persistent connections on your HTTP web server is nothing new. In a recent test of a SSL site, one of our clients enabled persistent connections on their servers as part of a new deployment. The results were quite impressive: for a single user & negligible server utilization, page durations dropped from 12 seconds to only 3.5 seconds. Persistent connections can contribute to much of this duration difference by reducing the amount of time needed establish new connections. The use of SSL makes this feature even more important, as the SSL layer requires additional session negotiation. … Continue reading »
For Lenox, makers of fine china and crystal, e-commerce has been an important aspect of the business for over ten years. When Lynch needed to test the Lenox website user capacity on short notice, Load Tester was the right tool for the job. It offered the features and flexibility to build complex, realistic test cases and identify performance bottlenecks. Read more about their experience.
ProtoTest, provider of consulting services in specialized software quality and test projects, uses Load Tester to help their clients determine how many users their websites can handle. I spoke with Lawrence Nuanez, Senior Consultant, to find out more.
Last time, I talked about why it is ok to start testing early in the development process. I’m going to continue that thought process to discuss load testing without complete performance requirements. This Load Testing 101 article says “If the real end user is going to do work with your application in a totally different way than you test you are as good as with no testing at all.” While there is a nugget of truth hidden in there, it is easy to take away the wrong understanding.
One interpretation of that statement would be that “you must have … Continue reading »
During testing of some sites, we found an strange case where pages seem to download themselves. What does this look like?
Note that the page gets requested, and seems to request itself while it is rendering. This has an obvious problem: the dynamic content is being requested twice as many times as necessary, causing the server to have to render it twice as often as necessary. If users turn off Load Tester’s “streaming” feature while recording, this looks a little different: the 2nd instance of the request is still made, but instead we get an error message: “Connection to server abandoned … Continue reading »
Jason Tower, in his Web Performance-sponsored BMW Spec E30, took second place last weekend at his most recent road race. He had never driven the Atlanta course before – nice job, Jason! Watch his in-car video (wow, that looks fast!) and hear more about the race on his blog.
How we add new virtual users to a test can be confusing when you’re first starting out with Load Tester, and sometimes can result in tests that do not ramp up to the number of users you expect or otherwise behave strangely.
This past weekend, Jason Tower ran in his first event of the year, the Winter Meltdown at CMP. Jason qualified 5th, but was gridded at the back of the pack because of his rookie status. He managed to move up a few slots to finish 9th. Except for a tiny bit of “paint trading”, the car performed great and there were no incidents. Kudos to Jason for being so well prepared. Web Performance is proud to be one of his sponsors!
Jason is racing Next week at Road Atlanta for a race with … Continue reading »
Bandwidth can be critical to the performance of a website. Since this is a rather obvious fact, it is common for our customers to watch for bandwidth as the limiting factor early in a testing effort. This is especially true when the load test results do not point immediately any other limitation, such as 100% CPU on the application server.
When faced with a poorly performing system but no obvious signs of limitations, it is natural to focus all energies on finding the cause of the problem. This might mean spending hours poring through firewall and router configurations, looking for anything … Continue reading »
How to measure the maximum capacity of your website in terms of concurrent users.
Occasional load-testing tips, performance-engineering notes, and product updates. No spam — unsubscribe anytime.