Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “Web Performance Load Tester”
Keeping your HOSTS files in sync with Load Tester 4.1
Load Tester 4.1 has a number of exciting new features, but in this post, let’s discuss one of the less obvious features: a hosts file which is automatically synchronized with all your Load Engines.
Consider how often this happens: the development environment is mirrored from your production environment, and then updated to an internal version of the application, ready for testing. Since the development environment is otherwise a mirror of the production system, it is configured with the same virtual hostnames as your production environment, and / or it may share the same SSL certificates which identify it with the hostname … 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 »
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.
Interview with Lawrence Nuanez of ProtoTest
ProtoTest, provider of consulting services in specialized software quality and test projects, uses Load Tester to help their clients determine how many users their websites can handle. I spoke with Lawrence Nuanez, Senior Consultant, to find out more.
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 »
Why is my Page being Hit more than Once per View?
During testing of some sites, we found an strange case where pages seem to download themselves. What does this look like?
Note that the page gets requested, and seems to request itself while it is rendering. This has an obvious problem: the dynamic content is being requested twice as many times as necessary, causing the server to have to render it twice as often as necessary. If users turn off Load Tester’s “streaming” feature while recording, this looks a little different: the 2nd instance of the request is still made, but instead we get an error message: “Connection to server abandoned … Continue reading »
Jason Tower Places Second at BMWCCA Road Atlanta
Jason Tower, in his Web Performance-sponsored BMW Spec E30, took second place last weekend at his most recent road race. He had never driven the Atlanta course before – nice job, Jason! Watch his in-car video (wow, that looks fast!) and hear more about the race on his blog.
User Capacity Analysis
How Many Users?
One of the most important goals of load testing is to find out how many users a particular website can handle simultaneously. For years, Load Tester has been the only product to give a direct, simple answer to that question. In the Load Tester 3.6 release the user capacity algorithm received a major overhaul, making the analysis more configurable, more flexible, and more accurate than ever before.
In this tutorial we’re going to look at some real-world load testing examples, and discover how user-capacity analysis tells us exactly how many users the web sites can handle.
Before We Begin
There are … Continue reading »
How-To: Dynamic Field Names and Multi-Variable Extractors
Overview
You’re recording test cases, configuring them, replaying them, and running load tests. One day, you attempt to test a new web application. However, every time you attempt to run a replay, the replay throws an extractor error; it is unable to find a field in the page content of the replay to extract. ASM configured this field automatically, so why isn’t it working? You look at the replay content … and the field name isn’t there.
The usual culprit that causes this problem is a dynamic field name: a variable in a dynamic web page that not only changes in value, … Continue reading »
