Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “Load Testing”
Tips for Successfully Testing from the Cloud
With Load Tester 4, we’ve made it easy to harness Amazon’s power for Load Engines quickly and inexpensively. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the basics, here are a few rules of thumb:
1. Get to know the Amazon EC2 Console . The console will quickly tell you what instances you have running – and subsequently what you are getting billed for.
Note that the console shows you only data for a selected region, so you should check each region separately. Load Tester will automatically prompt you after a test and before shutting down Load Tester if you have running engines … Continue reading »
Configuring File Uploads
When a testcase has a file upload in it, Load Tester automatically handles the file upload during replays and load tests. However, in many tests each user should upload different file contents (and possibly use a different file name). Load Tester has streamlined this process to make it very easy to handle. Just follow these easy steps:
1) Gather the set of files to be uploaded
2) Import them into Load Tester (Window > Preferences > Web Performance > File Upload) and generate a dataset
3) Find the file field in the testcase using the Fields View
4) Configure the field to use the … Continue reading »
Keeping Your Load Testing Cases Current (How To)
Maybe you’ve just finished your first crack at testing, handed some results up to the development team, and are just got a note that the dev team has revamped the site in preparation for the next test. Or maybe you completed testing last month and are ready to retest the site against any regressions. Are all the testcases setup from the last round of testing still going to work? Are you going to have to create all new testcases? Here are a few quick ways to find out:
1. Run a replay with your existing testcases. If the replay fails … Continue reading »
What is “Web Bandwidth” and how do you test it?
When diagnosing performance problems with our clients websites, it is not uncommon for the bandwidth to come into question. Very often, the bandwidth chart will show a distinct plateau and it can be difficult to determine if this is cause or effect. This example shows outgoing server bandwidth (green) as the users (blue) ramp up. It could be interpreted as a bandwidth limitation around 8Mbps. In this case it is not – the limitation is elsewhere in the system.
It can be challenging to prove that bandwidth is the problem. If the bandwidth is not reaching the known limits (i.e. what … Continue reading »
Is your Load Balancer increasing your Bandwidth usage?
Is your load balanced website using more bandwidth under load than a single server would? In a previous article (“Status code 200 didn’t match expected: 304”), we discussed how a website may return full data content back to a client, even when the browser had the resource cached. If you believed that adding an extra server and a load balancer will increase your performance, this can be an unsettling surprise. The problem arises when two web servers are delivering different Entity Tags for the same static resource:
In this example, we have two requests made to the same public URL, … Continue reading »
For Bell Canada, Early Performance Testing Spells Success
When Bell Canada began development of an important new customer-facing application, project lead Mr. Roger Bejjani knew he needed to find a web testing tool that would help fine-tune performance throughout the development process and into production. Having used Empirix (purchased by Oracle) and Load Runner (purchased by HP)in the past, he decided to forgo overpriced software and look for a tool that would give him the functionality he needed at a more reasonable price. The main requirement would be load testing HTTP and HTTPS requests, and the software needed to be easy to use during development as well as … Continue reading »
What is Load Testing?
Load test, performance test, stress test, soak test…there are numerous of terms to describe these efforts and even within the testing community there is not unanimous agreement. These definitions line up well with the most common usages:
Performance Testing – Any testing that is focused on measuring the performance of a system. This is in contrast to functional testing, which is primarily focused on measuring the correctness of the system. When you use a stopwatch to measure page load times in your browser, you are performance testing.
Load Testing – Performance testing with the goal of measuring the performance of a system … Continue reading »
Next Generation Testing: no test plan required
So you’ve got a shiny new site designed and ready for testing. You may get some questions like: who are your users, and what will they do while on your site? Sometimes questions like these can be answered with analytics, sometimes with educated guessing. However, for those who can’t answer these simple questions, some options still remain. Among those, one option may soon be a reality: monkeys – lots of monkeys.
In the past, deploying monkeys has been somewhat problematic, as it required extensive training to keep them stationary while using a keyboard & mouse while using computer. This limitation may … Continue reading »
Configuring and Analyzing Performance Goals
This tutorial will show you how you can use performance goals to customize the reports to give you information that is relevant to the individual performance requirements of your system. The goal is to help you learn to draw better conclusions from the data and get more accurate results. You’ll also spend less time poring through the data.
Persistent Connections & Performance
Reaping performance benefits from using persistent connections on your HTTP web server is nothing new. In a recent test of a SSL site, one of our clients enabled persistent connections on their servers as part of a new deployment. The results were quite impressive: for a single user & negligible server utilization, page durations dropped from 12 seconds to only 3.5 seconds. Persistent connections can contribute to much of this duration difference by reducing the amount of time needed establish new connections. The use of SSL makes this feature even more important, as the SSL layer requires additional session negotiation. … Continue reading »