Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “load test”
Case study: Lenox Finds a Baseline in the Cloud
For Lenox, makers of fine china and crystal, e-commerce has been an important aspect of the business for over ten years. When Lynch needed to test the Lenox website user capacity on short notice, Load Tester was the right tool for the job. It offered the features and flexibility to build complex, realistic test cases and identify performance bottlenecks. Read more about their experience.
Load Testing Fallacies: The Test Scenarios Must Be Completely Accurate
Last time, I talked about why it is ok to start testing early in the development process. I’m going to continue that thought process to discuss load testing without complete performance requirements. This Load Testing 101 article says “If the real end user is going to do work with your application in a totally different way than you test you are as good as with no testing at all.” While there is a nugget of truth hidden in there, it is easy to take away the wrong understanding.
One interpretation of that statement would be that “you must have … Continue reading »
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 »
Virtual User Calculators
Customers frequently ask us for help deciding how many virtual users they need for their load tests. We have a number of formulas for calculating this, depending on what information the customer has available. Last weekend I built online calculators for a few of the more popular variations. Give them a try!
If these don’t apply to the data you have available, contact us and we’ll be happy to help you calculate the number of simulated users required for your specific needs!
Load Tester improvement – better success and fail metrics
Previous versions of Load Tester had 2 metrics describing the success or failure of a web page (or single transaction) during a load test: Repeats and Errors. A Repeat was counted any time a valid HTTP response was received from the server. Errors, however, were a bit more complex. Errors could occur at any point in the transaction, from establishing a connection to post-response validation. An error was counted if the connection was terminated in the middle of a transaction. It was also counted if the status code from the server indicated a failure (e.g. a 500 status). Validators record … Continue reading »
