In some cases a customer may use google analytics to look for spikes in the number of page views per hour for a week or month. From this they may want to know how their load test results compare for number of page views. There are a couple of ways to try and calculate the number of page views per hour from a set of load test results using LoadStorm. (These examples are assuming the results came from load tests that were run for 60 minutes) The first, is an estimation from the average number of requests to complete a […]
Content Delivery Networks are systems designed to increase the capacity of your website. But is it worth implementing? How much does it improve scalability? 10%? 20%? 100%? Would you believe over 300%? How about that it alone quadrupled the amount of throughput our website can handle? Before we delve into the details of the results, we first need to explain what a Content Delivery Network is and how it works, so we can understand why these improvements were so dramatic. How it works A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that takes advantage of server placement, […]
As we have seen proven time and again by various customer satisfaction studies, web performance optimization is critical to a successful website or application. Slow sites cause unhappy customers, unhappy customers don’t make purchases and even often share their bad experiences with others. Its clear to see that web performance optimization is key to customer satisfaction. Check out our new slideshare presentation for a clear cut answer to the question: Why is Load Testing Important? And for some surprising statistics on just how important load testing is to ensure customer satisfaction under high traffic. Fast, Reliable Website = Happy Customers […]
I know a large number of LoadStorm’s clients understand load testing, scripting, and [insert all the technical jargon here] that comes along with it, but what about those of us who don’t? Therefore, I am writing this article for the people like me who just want quick, easy, plain english answers to the questions: What the heck is load testing? Why do I need it? How do I get started? What is Load Testing? In plain English, load testing is putting a large simulated “load” of virtual users on a website or web application and measuring the web servers capacity […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 when 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 […]
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 assessing how well their Moodle installations perform at high user loads. 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 […]
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 with using a large number of virtual users. 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 […]