In our previous post about image optimization, we talked about the pros and cons of the three major image formats found on the web and when each format should be used to give you the smallest file size with the most acceptable quality. The goal is to improve the performance of our web pages, so optimizing the quality/size ratio will result in better speed by reducing throughput. Today, we’ll be going over some more general tips about things you can do to make your images smaller and easier to download while still retaining an appropriate amount of quality. Dimensions This [...]
Image Optimization Part 1: File Formats
Almost all websites today have images. Photographs, logos, icons, backgrounds, web pages are now saturated with graphical content. And while this can allow for some incredibly beautiful (and also some downright ugly) websites, the more images a page has to load, the more server calls an HTML script needs to make. Meaning slower load times and frustrated users. This series will focus on things you can do to tweak your images and make them load faster, and that starts with choosing the right file format. JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the three most commonly used formats on the web. Each [...]
A Guide to Load Test Smarter
Jason Buksh is a Technical Project Manager and Performance & Load Test Consultant in London, England. Jason has extensive experience with performance testing at many companies including HSBC, CMC Markets & Siemens. He gives independent advice, is test tool agnostic and has wide experience with many of the leading market tools. Jason also writes many articles and runs the Performance Testing blog perftesting.co.uk We appreciate his time to share his thoughts and experience with us about a topic that gets us excited. Here are some tips from him to make the best of your load testing. 10 Tips from Jason [...]
Infographic: Real Performance Metrics from 14,000 Sites
Yottaa is a customer of LoadStorm’s load testing tool, and they are focused on helping companies speed up their website. They test and monitor thousands of web apps, and they recently compiled stats regarding web performance that I found interesting. Thus, I share it with you. The data sample comprised 14,000 different sites. They measured several aspects of web performance in metrics for front-end and back-end. The infographic below is well-designed and hopefully will be of value to you.
Stress Out Your Drupal Website with a World-class Specialist
The team over at Promet Source is sharing their expertise in a webinar showing you how to properly stress test your Drupal site. Andy Kucharski has asked me to join him in sharing best practices with anyone needing to understand the load testing process. Register for the webinar Andy is a frequent speaker at Drupal camps and conferences all over the country. He is recognized as one of the top minds in the world when it comes to architecting an effective Drupal implementation. Andy’s reputation recently has skyrocketed as the foremost performance specialist on Drupal technology. Real Drupal Performance Data [...]
Load Testing to Prepare for 2 Million Pageviews
Yesterday I received an email from a client named Mike. He’s a nurse. He is not a web developer, nor is he a software tester. He runs a very successful Christmas website TheSantaTracker. Anyway, he wrote a few paragraphs on his perspective (inexperienced, non-technical) on load testing. I thought I would post it here to share with everyone – especially because he has nice things to say about us! Some of this will sound like a commercial, and I apologize in advance for that. However, I hope those readers who are not regular coders or quality assurance folks will find [...]
Is LoadStorm a Good Solution?
Load Testing Solution – Our Customers Speak Out In a typical month, we get about 5-10 complimentary comments from our clients. Sometimes on the phone during a conversation where they are asking for advice, and sometimes in an email after they have tried the system. I usually ask if they will allow me to quote them. Most say yes, but there are restrictions from the legal departments of big corporations that prevent me from posting some fantastic testimonials. Normally, I put all the customer quotes (approved) on our load testing testimonials page. Today I thought this one deserved a blog [...]
Moodle Load Testing
Frederic Nevers recently wrote an excellent post on his blog about load testing a Moodle learning management application. He provides a step by step guide to assist Moodle developers in assessinghow well their Moodle installations perform at high load of users. It is thorough, yet direct in how to set up test scenarios. He even provides two CSV files to use for test users both in your application tables and as a form data set in LoadStorm. Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is [...]
Concurrent Virtual Users or Increasing Transaction Rate?
I’m going to write about increasing the number of transactions to simulate a higher number of Virtual Users. This is a common technique used by performance testers to ‘cheat’ or rather avoid the high costs associated charged by vendors. I recently answered a question on Linkedin and suggested increasing the transaction rate. I was sent the following message by Jim: “Saw a reply on here where you suggested increasing no of iterations to increase load… I’m not a big fan of this at all, as it really doesn’t do that, it compresses time instead so for example say I have [...]
An Honor to Share Our Web Performance Tuning Article
“My name is Jovana.” Usually when I receive an email that starts out like the sentence above, I figure that I’m about to be solicited for something to which my wife would strongly object. Then upon further reading, I realized this email was legit and became intrigued at the request. “I found your article extremely interesting and would like to spread the word for people from Ex Yugoslavia.” That was very cool. Everyone enjoys hearing that their writing is valuable to someone – even better if they want to pass it on to their friends! Jovana found value in our [...]