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 […]
Here at LoadStorm, we’re happy to announce one of our newest, free features! Are you interested in web development? Have you creating your own site? QuickStorms are a great tool to get initial insight into site performance, and can also be used as a tool to benchmark performance before making performance enhancements on your site. What is a QuickStorm? QuickStorms are small, short load tests that can be used to evaluate site performance. All you have to do is enter your site’s URL. LoadStorm will generate a load test against the URL, scaling from 1 – 10 virtual users over […]
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 […]
Cyber Monday is a pretty big deal for online retailers. In fact, the previous statement is much too modest. Cyber Monday is the biggest day of the year for ecommerce in the United States and beyond. As the statistics show, Cyber Monday has become a billion dollar juggernaut since 2010 – and it has only continued to grow. Last year alone, Cyber Monday was responsible for over $1.7 billion spent by online consumers in the US, a shocking 18% jump from the year before! Since its inception in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving has become a potential goldmine for those […]
Today, LoadStorm published a press release announcing our new Transaction Response Timing. For many professional performance testers, especially those used to products like HP Loadrunner or SOASTA CloudTest, wrapping timings around logical business processes and related transactions, is a familiar concept. For those of you that aren’t familiar, I’ll explain. What is Transaction Response Time? Transaction Response Time represents the time taken for the application to complete a defined transaction or business process. Why is it important to measure Transaction Response Time? The objective of a performance test is to ensure that the application is working optimally under load. However, […]
The FCC Proposes to End Net Neutrality This week’s web performance news hits close to home for performance engineers. The concept of “the end of net neutrality” leaked a couple weeks ago and the public response was very strong. Learn more about what net neutrality means to you from our blog post last week. Last Thursday (5/15) the FCC voted on a proposal that will allow internet “fast lanes” for companies willing and able to pay for them. The proposal was accepted by a 3-2 majority vote. The vote was divided down party lines with the 3 democratic commissioners voting […]
This idea of “Net Neutrality” has been all over the news lately. In fact, just a quick google search will turn up numerous articles published in all the top news sources including Washington Post, the NewYorker, Fox News, Huffington Post and NBC News. And after doing some research, its very clear why net neutrality is on the forefront of so many articles- the new rules proposed by the FCC “may be the end of the Internet as we know it” (Gerry Smith, Huffington Post). What is Net Neutrality? Net neutrality is the concept that Internet service providers (ISP’s) should allow […]
A Look Back at Healthcare.gov The period of time during which individuals are able to take part in the open enrollment end March 31, 2014. The amount of publicity Healthcare.gov received in October last year drew in numerous discussions. The situation has settled down and now we can look back with a clearer picture. Complex System Healthcare.gov was more than just a website. It’s a front-end for an entire set of systems interconnected to exchange data. The system has to make requests to a handful of other agencies checking for citizenship, financial eligibility, IRS, Homeland Security, SSA, etc. Because of […]
Does Adblock improve your load time? An essential rule is to have ad banners displayed after the main content is displayed. In terms of perception, users wont notice the banner until they find the content they’re looking for on the page. While your web page will most likely download less data, your perception of speed isn’t likely to fluctuate drastically due to the adblock extension. Perhaps testing this would be an interesting experiment! How does adblock work? Adblock takes the div of the ad and gives it a height of 0. You can test this by putting a mini ad […]
Brief History: How IE 6 Ruined Internet Explorer’s Reputation In the early 2000s, IE 6 was the dominant web browsers that reigned supreme due to the lack of competition. This gave them the power to set the standard. Unfortunately, the standard was set all the way down to Satan’s feet. Because there wasn’t any competition at the time, the standard didn’t matter. Web developers had to make their websites compatible with IE. It was never the other way around. The lack of debugging tools, performance optimizations, and upgrades were little to none. IE 6 was released in 2000. For five […]