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 […]
Let’s say you are a web developer and have now come around to load testing your website. It’s important to make sure the load test results are reliable and useful; so how do you guarantee this? Take a look at these 3 useful load testing tips you can use with LoadStorm PRO to get more effective results and save time. Tip one: Scale Gradually If you’re a first time web performance tester, it is a good idea to underestimate rather than overestimate the amount of load your server can handle. If your initial influx of VUsers is too high from […]
This post is a continuation of my Scaling Magento testing experiment (see part one). Testing Phase After getting the first testing environment setup, it was already time to test. Luckily for me, the VUser activity script was already finished back before this project was proposed. So running an identical load test was as simple as doing a Copy & Edit to our previous load test. Here is the activity of the two tests. In this case, x refers to the xth VUser in the load test. VUser x hits the homepage VUser x logs in as “wil”, a previously generated […]
Introduction When December rolled around, I had been with the Web Performance Lab for 4 months. By then, it was time for another realistic experiment. For months, my focus had primarily been AWS management and scaling Magento in addition to my blogging duties. I was asked to approach this project as if I had been dealing with one of our valued clients. We had one of our software engineers act as an e-commerce vendor who happened to use Magento. He laid out some requirements, then I discussed it with him and went to work. I was pretty excited about this […]
Recently we decided to upgrade our WordPress core to version 3.7.1 and we figured we would perform some tests to see how the change affected us. I took our baseline of 11 performance tests (using webpagetest.org) and a single load test (using LoadStorm) to compare to our new set of data after upgrading to the new version. It was fun to see how things would perform, but the results were not shocking. There was virtually no difference between the performance tests. The page load time was on average 1.22% slower, and we’re talking tiny fractions of a second so the […]
Tis the season…. Why haven’t large corporations learned the value of load testing yet? How could e-commerce sites not be ready to handle the increased traffic for the busiest selling period of the year? Unfortunately, with the high traffic of Cyber Monday, certain websites were unable to meet customer expectations. Ok, let’s be honest – bad web performance cost some sites money and really made buyers angry. Let’s conduct a review to see what we can learn. First, a few relevant statistics: For the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online buying from desktop computers totaled $5.3 billion, up […]
In our previous post about helping the Delivergood Magento store by enabling a Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) distribution, we saw the benefits that a CDN could provide for their store’s scalability. Let’s go into detail about how you might shape your distribution by asking some questions. Do you want the CDN distribution to take almost all the work off of your main server or only some of it? How busy do you want to keep the CDN distribution? All of these questions determine how much time you will put in obtaining the most out of your Cloudfront distribution. For […]
According to government documents obtained by NBC News, Healthcare.gov was stress tested before launch. Response times reached a failure level for the testers at about 1,100 users. On many websites that would be sufficient. But wait a minute…this site was designed to support 50 times that number?! The Obama administration is quoted in USA Today as saying they expected 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users for the first few days of the new site’s launch. So what about load testing? OK, let’s do the math: 60k concurrent users expected $600 million paid for the development Load testing failed at 1,100 users […]
There are several ways we could go about answering this question. Our engineering team could probably write a whole book to explain cloud load testing on a very technical level. On another level, I wanted to explain it using a single graphic. LoadStorm can be explained in 5 simple steps: 1. A tester builds scenarios (also call scripts or playbacks) 2. The LoadStorm controller activates load generation servers 3. Virtual users storm the target application and follow the actions laid out in the scenarios 4. LoadStorm measures the responses of the application (such as response times, errors, and throughput) 5. […]