Load Testing Blog
Load Testing Services Case Study: Mammoth Mountain Ski Area
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.
How-To: Dynamic Field Names and Multi-Variable Extractors
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 »
Estimating Load test ramp-up times
How long should my load test take? How quickly should the test ramp-up users? Is there a right answer, or a wrong one?
Newest Version of Web Performance Load Testing Software Gives Developers Easier, More Accurate Tests
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
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 6, 2009 – Web Performance, Inc. (WPI) released the most recent version of its industry-leading website performance 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 … Continue reading »
Performance Goals and Analysis Methods
We are getting close enough to the 3.6 release that I’m able to talk more about the new features – so look for more posts in the next few days. I blogged previously about the improved performance goal features, but at the time, I could not detail how they would be used to improve Load Tester’s analysis reports.
Web Performance, Inc. Helps Massage Envy Scale for the Holiday Season
Load testing quickly locates source of CPU overload, providing maximum capacity for busy holiday season on schedule to maximum capacity.
Durham, NC – March 23, 2009 – As Massage Envy prepared for a record of online gift card sales its agency, The Lavidge Company, worked with Web Performance, Inc. (WPI) to load test the environment so it could meet demand. Web Performance worked with the agency and found ways of increasing the number of concurrent users each Web server could handle allowing each server to handle 4x more traffic.
Using its Web Performance Load Tester application, WPI began … Continue reading »
Local Network Connections
We recently had a customer that exhibited a particular error message whenever the site went past 60-70 simultaneous users. There were two servers under test, a webserver and a database/application server. The only symptom we could see in the load test reports was a large number of failed TCP connections on the webserver, but not on the database server.
Their webserver was using CGI to build and display pages. The CGI script would make a local TCP connection to a communications service running on the same machine, which would then seek out a remote application server to service the request. At … Continue reading »
Search view added for Load Tester 3.6
As web applications become more sophisticated, configuration of testcases used to test the application becomes more difficult. The need for customization, beyond the automatic configuration provided in Load Tester, means that testers need to spend more time understanding the application. One common scenario finds the tester searching through the application pages to determine where a field is assigned, in order to configure a custom extractor to get the value dynamically. Several of the features added in Load Tester 3.6 makes this process much easier.
In the example below, the Search View is used to find a field with dropUsers in the … Continue reading »
Web Performance, Inc. Works Out Kinks in Massage Envy Website Prior to Launch
Durham, NC – March 23, 2009 – Days before launching its new website and online reservation system, Massage Envy and its development partners ran into a snag: The site couldn’t meet its performance goal of 150 concurrent users. The site’s developers called in Web Performance, Inc. (WPI), whose initial performance tests showed the site could only support 34 simultaneous users.
Using its Web Performance Load Tester application, WPI began systematically testing various components of the system, quickly locating a key section of code that wasn’t scaling properly.
“Without performing a load test, Massage Envy wouldn’t have seen this
problem until the site went … Continue reading »
Web Performance, Inc. Releases Safari 4 Browser Performance Research Reports
Durham, NC (PRWEB) – Once again Apple is claiming the superiority of its Safari web browser, and once again Web Performance, Inc. (WPI) is testing that claim. WPI used its industry-leading Web performance web load and stress testing software to evaluate Safari’s performance in real time.
WPI tested Safari 4, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), and Chrome 1, using Firefox 3.0 as a baseline. They tested all of the browsers on the top 15 most popular sites as ranked by Alexa.com as of February 3, 2009. Sites included Facebook, Google, eBay, craigslist, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. The real-time measurements were taken for both … Continue reading »