Load Testing Blog

Load Testing from the Cloud

Over the last few weeks I’ve been tinkering with Amazon’s EC2 service, setting up a Load Tester load engine AMI and running tests from cloud instances.  Our conclusion is that cloud engines can be useful, but there are some things you need to be careful about because they can cause subtle problems or even invalidate your test.
Getting Started
You’ll need to follow the Amazon instructions for getting set up on the service, as laid out in the Getting Started Guide.  This is a somewhat non-trivial process that involves generating an X.509 certificate, and an SSH … Continue reading »

Performance goals and analysis methods in 3.6 release

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.

Load Testing A Web Application Running in a Virtual Machine

Determining the CPU cost of virtualization with VMware ESX
The performance of our reference application under load (a default SugarCRM installation) on a virtualized server showed a 14% decrease, measured by total system capacity, compared to the same system running natively on equivalent hardware.
Read the report

Load Testing a Virtual Web Application

Measuring the Performance Impact of Virtualizing a Web Application Server
Virtualization is hot. Over the past few months, it would be difficult to pick an IT magazine out of my stack that does not have an article on Virtualization. Even in our small company, we have two VMware servers. This allowed us to reduce 9 underutilized servers down to two physical machines. Because the original severs were severely underutilized, the virtualized servers actually perform better (running on newer hardware). They are easier to manage – especially for backups. We have reduced the risk of configuration changes, software installs and upgrades by … Continue reading »

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