Load Testing Blog
Jason Tower BMW Spec E30 racing update
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 »
How To: Run a Load Test to rule out Bandwidth Limitations
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 »
User Capacity Analysis
How to measure the maximum capacity of your website in terms of concurrent users.
Push-button load testing inside the cloud means success for eArcu
Push-button load testing inside the cloud means success for eArcu
Checklist: Is your Load Test ready to run?
Here are a few quick pointers for checking your Load Test, to see if you are ready to run. Feel free to check back, as this list may be updated from time to time.
Test Planning:
Have the appropriate parties been notified of the test?
Do any of the servers have scheduled jobs during the test window? Automatic backups or other maintenance windows that are scheduled during normal down-time or idle-time can have surprising results during a high volume test.
Is the firewall going to be an issue? When using a small set of external IPs to generate load, make sure the firewall administrators … Continue reading »
When Load Testing Just Works
One of the main features I wanted to design into a load testing tool was the ability to “just work” for most things. Reverse engineering how a website works just to get a load test done is no fun, especially since its possible to automate much of the process and you can spend your time testing instead. Which is why it was great to get an email from someone trying our demo who noticed we handled his dynamic SID configuration in a few minutes where his previous load testing tool took four hours.
The specific thing I was referring to … Continue reading »
Using Elastic IPs with Amazon EC2 cloud-based load engines
Amazon’s Elastic IPs provide an easy way to assign a fixed IP address to cloud-based load engines – which would typically have a different IP address each time one is created.
Moving Load Tester™ To A New Computer
If you’ve installed Load Tester™ on a workstation, and are in the process of upgrading to a new workstation, you may be wondering how to move your Load Tester™ installation between the workstations. For version 4.0, this is not a difficult process, and generally can be completed in four steps:
Install a copy of Load Tester on your new workstation. New installers are available at www.webperformance.com/download
Copy the .WPT files from the old workstation (if they are not already saved on a network share). These files contain your recorded & configured testcases, as well as load test results.
Transfer your License … Continue reading »
Web Performance Load Tests Race Car
At Web Performance we’re interested in things that go fast, whether they’re websites or cars, so it’s only natural that we are sponsoring Jason Tower’s inaugural road racing season in his BMW Spec E30. As a rallycrosser myself, I’m excited to be involved with grassroots racing as Jason – pardon the pun – stress tests his E30 on courses from VIR to Mid Ohio to Road Atlanta. He’s so good, he can turn left AND right!
The Spec E30 concept is cool: drivers compete based on their driving skills, not their wallet, which is where you get the … Continue reading »
Solving Server Problems with the Waiting Users and Average Wait Time Metrics
Learn how to diagnose the tricky situation where a server periodically hangs on pages.