We field a lot of questions about load testing websites with 3rd party components on the pages containing advertisements or user tracking mechanisms. For many of our users, we recommend leaving these out of the load test entirely. For some users this causes some concern over maintaining the realism of the load test. In this post, I’m going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of dealing with these in a load test – and then provide some quick instructions for easily keeping these services out of your load test.
I’ll start by looking at the possible advantages of including these services … Continue reading »
Web testers are about to discover a whole new level of performance testing with the release of Load Tester, Version 4.0 from Web Performance, Inc. (WPI). Load Tester 4 gives users access to the cloud network—a virtual network of servers spread across the globe—to let developers conduct performance tests outside their own networks and simulate greater numbers of potential site visitors.
“Our latest version of Load Tester was designed to generate loads from both in the lab and outside the network,” says Michael Czeiszperger, founder of WPI. “Along with all the benefits of previous releases, Version 4.0 lets our customers specify … Continue reading »
New software includes click to configure test case development, visual performance indicators, user-level analysis and expanded compatibility with AJAX and .NET.
Durham, NC – May 7, 2009 – Web Performance, Inc. (WPI) released the most recent version of its industry-leading load testing application last week. Web Performance Load Tester version 3.6 includes a number of new features that make it even easier to use and more intuitive for its non-programmer user base.
One of the application’s most appealing new features is its use of visual displays and video demonstrations that let users with zero programming experience create test cases, run load … Continue reading »
A great deal of time at the Velocity Conference has been spent on client-side performance optimization. This encompasses changes to the page structure and sub-elements to speed the delivery of a usable page to the user. Here at Web Performance, we have primarily been concerned with server-side performance – due to our focus on load-testing. Client-side optimization, however, benefits the users even when the server is not under load. It is something that we would like to expend more effort on when working with our clients.
Some of the most common client-side optimization techniques discussed were:
1) Reducing round-trips to the server
reduce … Continue reading »
One of the opening sessions of the Velocity 2009 conference was a joint session with engineers from Microsoft Live Search (Bing) and Google Search…yes, they were together on the same stage :>
Both organizations wanted to measure the effects of performance on the business – i.e. on revenue. Revenue for search sites is based on the number of searches and on the number of clicks on results. Both of the search giants have experimentation platforms which allow them to send a small portion of real users to a different version of the search platform, where they can modify the user experience … Continue reading »
My first day at Velocity was long, but fun. I breathed a sigh of relief when my luggage finally arrived…10 hours after I did.
I attended part of a Load Testing workshop early in the afternoon that raised some interesting topics:
Why are steady ramps bad? They showed some examples of how this approach can result in the wrong conclusions about system capacity. I agreed heartily – I’ve blogged on the merits of a stepped ramp in load tests previously.
Abandonment rates – This is a feature that I’d like to get into Load Tester sooner rather than later. A basic … Continue reading »
High Anticipated Demand is Met with Aplomb
MAMMOTH LAKES, CA – For the first time in several years, Mammoth Mountain opened up sales of their popular Mammoth Value Pass (MVP) to new purchasers. Given that there were only 38,000 passes available, and those passes were only being sold for one month, Mammoth Mountain’s web site had to be up to speed and capable of handling the load or, as Brahm Goodis, Web Developer for Mammoth Mountain, said, “it was crucial to make sure our site could handle the potential load.” Mammoth Mountain had used the load testing services of … Continue reading »
Fortunately, Mammoth Mountain’s team was prepared and was already working on an updated version of the site that enabled them to make a number of performance enhancements. They put that version of the site into production, and WPI tested again against the new version of the site. The updated version performed much better, easily meeting Mammoth Mountain’s performance goals.
Overview
You’re recording test cases, configuring them, replaying them, and running load tests. One day, you attempt to test a new web application. However, every time you attempt to run a replay, the replay throws an extractor error; it is unable to find a field in the page content of the replay to extract. ASM configured this field automatically, so why isn’t it working? You look at the replay content … and the field name isn’t there.
The usual culprit that causes this problem is a dynamic field name: a variable in a dynamic web page that not only changes in value, … Continue reading »
How long should my load test take? How quickly should the test ramp-up users? Is there a right answer, or a wrong one?
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