Load Testing Blog
Web Performance Load Tests Comic-Con Badges
Comic-Con represents the worst-case scenario for any website. As the event’s popularity grows, so does the load on its ticketing servers. This year, as many as 900,000 visitors competed for 130,000 tickets—all at the exact same time.
Load Tester 6.1 Release
Load Tester 6.1 adds the ability to perform file uploads within real-browser testcases. See the link for instructions on using this new feature.
The release updates support for Chrome to include versions 33-36.
In addition, we have improved the user distribution algorithm specifically for real-browser tests. The real-browser replay logs now include annotations about datasource usage, so you can easily see, for example, which login was used from a dataset when an error occurred. See the change log for the additional bug fixes contained in the release.
Load Tester RB Upgrade Policy
If you’re an existing Web Performance Load Tester™ customer you may be wondering if the real browser capability will be included in Load Tester 6.0. Because the real browser technology is so different, Load Tester 6.0 is being released in two different editions: Load Tester PRO™ for virtual browsers, and Load Tester RB™ for real browsers.
Load Tester PRO 6.0 Upgrades
If you currently own a license for Load Tester PRO™ you’ll be receiving a free upgrade to the 6.0 release, but that release will not include real browser load testing functionality. If you’re interested in trying out real browsers, Load … Continue reading »
Load Tester 6.0 RB Released!
Load Tester RB™ introduces an exciting new capability: generating load with real browsers using Selenium/WebDriver. Instead of simulated browsers hitting your website, WebDriver controls actual browsers, each one behaving as if an actual user was sitting there clicking and typing. There is no more accurate way to do web testing, and you have absolute confidence that your website is being hit with the most realistic web traffic, and thus are getting the most accurate pictures of your website’s performance.
Our beta customers have reported being able to more quickly develop test cases for complicated websites, drastically cutting the amount of time it … Continue reading »
How do you know if a load testing tool is accurate?
There are several different aspects to a question like this. The aspect that I’m going to address is: “How do I know that the load generator is accurate when it’s running a lot of users?” Or put another way, “How do I know that the load generator itself isn’t overloaded and is reporting inaccurate results?”
I could get all theoretical on you, citing a variety of technologies and design approaches used in our software to ensure it is accurate. I’d show some nice, official-looking white papers and report all the successes that our other customers have experienced using our software. But … Continue reading »
Load Tester 6.0 Beta 2 – Real Browsers
Load Tester 6 introduces an exciting new capability: generating load with real browsers. This technology, leveraging the Selenium/WebDriver project, brings a number of important advantages:
Testcase configuration and debugging is more intuitive
Test results accurately describe the end-user experience
Testing very complex and sophisticated AJAXy applications is much easier
Here is a pic of what a testcase looks like when using real browsers for testing. We hope you’ll agree that it is much more intuitive:
We are confident these improvements make Load Tester a more efficient and pleasant tool to use – but now we want to hear what YOU think about it! Are … Continue reading »
Accuracy of Load Testing with Real Browsers vs Virtual Browsers
Comparing the two directly is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because they measure different things. Actually, Load Tester measures a lot of the same things for each, but what is generally considered the most important metric – Page Duration – is actually measuring a different aspect of performance in each case.
Virtual Browsers
Virtual Browsers work at the HTTP layer – they send the same HTTP messages to the server that real browsers would send. The Page Duration measures the time from the beginning of the first request that is sent to the server to the end of the last response for a … Continue reading »
IE 11 Support Added in Latest Load Tester 5.5 patch
Earlier last month, Microsoft began rolling out IE 11 updates for Windows 7 users. Now, with the most recent release of Load Tester 5.5, you can rest assured that Load Tester will continue to allow you to record your testcases using the upgraded IE 11.
IE 11 includes a number of new enhancements (many of which are reserved for Windows 8.1 customers). However, on Windows 7, users can still benefit from improved performance and standards support.
One of the interesting modifications of note is a new change to IE’s user agent header. Starting with IE 11, the browser … Continue reading »
How to get a Quote for Load Testing Services
One of the first questions from customers interested in finding out the performance of their website is “how much will it cost?”. The main cost drivers for load testing are the number and complexity of the test cases, and the number and size (in concurrent users) of the test iterations. This blog post will explain how to describe your requirements and get an accurate cost estimate split into two types of charges: setup, and test iteration.
Setup Costs
The results of a load test are only as good as the quality of the test cases, but there is a large variation in … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.4: Now on OSX!
Note: This blog post rates high in Google searches, but is a couple of years out of date. Please read this for the latest on our OSX load testing software.
Hi, I’m Michael Czeiszperger, the original author of the Load Tester 1.0 and 2.0. Although Load Tester originally ran on OSX, 10 years ago the future of that platform was very much up for grabs, and with 99% of our sales on Windows, the OSX version was dropped. Fast forward to 2013, and I decided that 10 years of running Load Tester on my OSX machine through an emulator was 10 … Continue reading »