Load Testing Blog
Load Tester 5.4 Released!
Our goal with Load Tester 5.4 was to build the easiest to use load testing tool, even if you had no experience with load testing. It should just make sense when you look at it, with every button in the right place and all of the right information at your fingertips. We’ve spent most of 2013 reworking the user interface, trying out several different ways of doing the normal load testing workflow, until it both looked great and let us get load testing done as quickly as possible.
But of course, user interface improvements weren’t the only changes: we threw in … Continue reading »
DynaTrace Support in Web Performance Load Tester 5.4
DynaTrace (now known as “Compuware APM for Enterprise Tiers”) is a tool to analyze performance as requests pass from the front-end webserver back to various application servers, database servers, and web services. It’s marketed as a way to obtain deep insight into performance problems without the overhead and inconvenience of other more intrusive profiling tools. During a load test, DynaTrace works best if requests are annotated with metadata. We added a feature to emit DynaTrace-compatible metadata to Load Tester 5.4.
DynaTrace support is a premium feature sold separately from Load Tester PRO or our other offerings, but you … Continue reading »
Scheduling Load Tests with Load Tester 5.4
Many of our customers want to run tests off-hours to minimize collateral inconveniences. For example, if the rest of your QA team is working on the same test server as you, it might behoove you to run a load test at 2:00 AM when the team is asleep. Load Tester has had the ability to schedule off-hours tests for years, but the feature remains a frequently asked question among potential testers.
In Load Tester 5.4’s streamlined user interface, you can schedule a test from the ‘Control’ menu by choosing “Schedule Load Test.” A “Scheduled Operation” dialog will appear, and you can … Continue reading »
Windows VPN support available in Load Tester 5.4
If you’ve ever used Load Tester on a machine with Windows VPN configurations, it may have seemed strange that Load Tester would become unable to record while the VPN was connected. Disconnecting the VPN would allow Load Tester to record normally. Fortunately, this is improved in Load Tester 5.4, so recording & playback work as expected while a VPN is connected.
To understand how this improvement works, let’s take a look first at why VPNs need special configuration.
When you Connect to your VPN, the VPN connection is established, giving you access to the remote network. However, separate from the VPN Properties, … Continue reading »
Stronger NTLM session security supported for Load Tester 5.4
Let’s say you’re testing an internal site which uses Integrated Windows Authentication. You may have already been running regular tests on this site with no difficulty. Then, an administrator runs a security tool (such as the Windows Security Configuration Wizard) and suddenly your Load Tests now fail with HTTP 401 Unauthorized responses.
What happened?
One cause of this can be a feature of NTLM security was enabled, requiring clients to support NTLMv2 “session” security. While this security feature is stronger, it is not universally supported by all clients, including legacy versions of Load Tester.
Getting past the issue is easy: just upgrade Load … Continue reading »
Monitoring Server Performance through Firewalls now easier with Proxy Tunnels in Load Tester 5.4
So you’re getting setup to run your next test. You’ve installed our server monitor agent on each server, and are ready to start collecting server data while the test is running. However, there’s a snag: your workstation is on a different network from the servers, and you’re not able to open up the firewall on the servers to forward traffic.
Enter Load Tester 5.4. Load Tester 5.4 supports connecting to server agents through a SOCKS proxy. This means that if you can get a SSH session open to even just one server behind the firewall, you can now monitor your servers.
Start … Continue reading »
How Much Bandwidth Do You Need To Do a Load Test?
One of the common questions people are interested in is finding out how much a test is going to cost. There are a lot of factors that go into this equation, such as getting an appropriately sized testing license, configuring a test server environment, reserving hardware for Load Engines, and bandwidth costs between the Load Engines and the content delivery servers (such as a CDN or origin servers). Let’s take a look at just how we might calculate the bandwidth charges that are involved in a single test.
If your site is only needs to support a few hundred users, then … Continue reading »
Measuring Web Page Load Times using JMeter
At last count there were over 65 separate commercial load testing tools out there, but few with the name recognition of the open source program JMeter. Often people will call us up and ask to compare Load Tester with JMeter, but I only had a cursory look at it many years ago, and couldn’t speak from recent first-hand knowledge. So, when someone called me last week asking about JMeter, it seemed like a good opportunity to give it another look.
Web Performance Consulting
Measuring Pagespeed and Customer Engagement
Recently we started using Google Pagespeed here at webperformance.com, and one of the cool features you can do with it is split traffic, so half of your customers get no pagespeed, and the other half get pagespeed turned on. With this approach you can actually measure how pagespeed does across your entire site, as well as drill down and look at its effects on individual pages, or even divide performance by country or continent.
As you can see, the effects on our top four most popular pages were mixed. The most improved page was the list of product … Continue reading »
If you absolutely can not test your production system…
In my last post in this series, I asserted that you must test your production system and then promptly dismissed all the popular reasons for not doing so. But in the real world, things aren’t so simple. There will be cases where the production system can not be tested – for example, because test data can not be effectively purged from the system without a significant investment.
So, if you are in that situation, what can you do? If you cannot test your production environment, then you must recreate the production environment as precisely as possible. Every place that the … Continue reading »