Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “Load Testing”
Measuring the Performance Effects of mod_deflate in Apache 2.2
Enabling mod_deflate can reduce the bandwidth usage on a particular file by up to 70%, but also reduces the maximum load a server can handle and may actually reduce site performance if the site compresses large dynamic files. Read the full report for a complete analysis.
Is the last mile relevant to Load Testing?
One of our competitors has recently been emphasizing the use of their monitoring network during load tests. The pitch goes something like this: “With our last-mile monitoring network you can determine how different geographical regions will experience your web pages.” This solution has been implemented by using testing agents in the homes of real consumers to measure performance during a load test.
At first glance, this peaked our interest. However, after some analysis, we started to question the real value of this approach to load testing:
Will this approach dilute the value of the load test results?
Can the same information be obtained … Continue reading »
New Load Tester feature – web page performance goals
Load Tester has supported the concept of a performance goal for quite a while, but the implementation has been rather limited. We have completed work on an improved version for our next release (3.6). Load Tester now provides the ability to set a performance goal for each web page and/or transaction in a testcase individually. Of course, you can still specify a global page performance goal, as you could in the past. In addition, users can specify a default page (or transaction) duration goal for an entire testcase and then override that value for each page or transaction. The performance … Continue reading »
Load Testing a cluster of web servers
Ok – so you’ve spent months putting together a shiny new mission-critical web application, complete with multiple web servers, a few application and/or database servers. There is a load balancer in the mix or maybe you are using Microsoft NLB (Network Load Balancing). The system is nearly ready to deploy and it is time to run a load test. The first inclination is to fire up the load testing tool and throw the maximum expected load at the entire cluster. After all, there is no sense in wasting time with the smaller pieces, right? Wrong.