Web Performance Lab Archives – LoadStorm

Click to Zoom Experiment: When it comes to web performance, study after study has proven: fast and scalable wins the race. But with thousands of WordPress hosting providers, how do you know which one is fast and scalable? That is where ReviewSignal.com comes in. Their business is all about helping people identify which hosting provider is the best choice for them. Kevin Ohashi from ReviewSignal has been working with LoadStorm to run a series of load tests on some of the top WordPress hosting providers to determine which is the best for companies who need scalable websites. Our performance engineers […]

Introduction: How the big brand name e-commerce sites handle the heavy traffic on Cyber Monday is always of great interest to our team and our readers. So this year, we decided to run a short experiment on some of the top companies to bring you the best and the worst performers this Cyber Monday. The 28 companies we chose to test included companies who had painful Cyber Monday crashes in previous years, companies who were running fantastic online deals, and companies that are known to have huge volumes of online holiday shopping traffic. Experiment: We ran WebPageTest, an open source […]

The Web Performance Lab has been working hard to improve our testing and scoring methodology, and the new benchmark for Magento is here! We had high expectations for Magento because it is such a favorite among web developers globally. Unfortunately, the testing shows that the scalability of an out-of-the-box implementation of Magento was disappointing. Our target objectives for scalability and web performance were not achieved by the load tests, and we saw slower response and more errors at a lower volume than we hoped. Experiment Methodology Our Magento e-commerce platform has been installed on an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute m3.Large […]

The new e-commerce experiments are here! The goal of these experiments is to expose how well these e-commerce platforms perform in their most basic setup when running on an Amazon m3.large server. To test the scalability of each platform, we will run three hour-long tests to ensure reproducible results. This time around we are utilizing quick, preliminary testing to establish a rough baseline for the amount of users each platform can handle. In addition, the Web Performance Lab has modified the criteria that will be used to determine performance failure. WooCommerce Experiment Methodology The first platform we will be re-working […]

You probably have been wondering why I’ve posted so infrequently over the past year. We have been bombarded with emails and phone calls demanding more blogging that includes my extremely dry, obtuse humor. So, in the interest of global stability and national security, I must acquiesce to the will of the masses. Right. That’s a joke. I’m only slightly more popular than Justin Bieber. If you are a serious tech geek, you’ll need to look up that Bieber reference. Web performance is why you read our blog, and web performance is my life. I want our blog to contain the […]

  This post is part of a series: First – Previous Introduction Drupal Commerce is the last stop on our tour of e-commerce platforms. Drupal is a free content management system, and Drupal Commerce is an extension that allows you to build a web store with Drupal. This setup is similar to WooCommerce and Virtuemart, which both rely on their own content management systems. If you missed our previous posts, we are load testing six different e-commerce platforms and scoring them based on web performance. We continue our e-commerce benchmarking series by giving you a glimpse of out-of-the-box Drupal Commerce […]

  This post is part of a series: First – Previous – Next Introduction OpenCart is yet another free, open source e-commerce solution for the typical user. When you search for “OpenCart” on Google, you will be surprised by what comes up. The first result is under the domain opencart.us, which is not the one we will test because it is proprietary. The correct OpenCart is the second entry: http://www.opencart.com/ If you missed our previous posts, we are scoring six different e-commerce platforms based on web performance. We continue our e-commerce benchmarking series by giving you a glimpse of OpenCart […]

  This post is part of a series: First – Previous – Next Introduction We’re past the halfway mark for our e-commerce benchmarking experiments where we score a bunch of open source e-commerce platforms for performance. Next up is VirtueMart, which is an e-commerce extension for the Joomla content management system. The first time through, I had anticipated VirtueMart to be a standalone e-commerce platform. VirtueMart’s official site also doesn’t mention Joomla on the front page, or that VirtueMart is an extension. It’s funny because VirtueMart’s official Twitter page shows that information but their official website doesn’t. The VirtueMart Sample […]

  This post is part of a series: First – Previous – Next Introduction osCommerce has been around since 2000, making it the oldest of all the e-commerce platforms in this series. You will notice its age when looking at the sample data homepage (The Matrix and Unreal Tournament are hot new items for sale). Despite its age, osCommerce is still in use today; companies design and specialize in it. It’s time to put this seasoned e-commerce veteran to the test. How will it fare against modern supergiants like Magento or the new flashy WooCommerce? If you missed our previous […]

  This post is part of a series: First – Next An Extension of WordPress A look at Google Trends indicate that WooCommerce has been gaining popularity very quickly over the past three years. This could be due to WordPress already being prolific on the content management side of things. Users who already have a WordPress site can easily implement a web store of their very own. This is in contrast to Magento, which is built for true enterprise-level transactions (even if it’s just Magento Community Edition).   Background and Setup If you missed our previous blog post, we are […]