Professional software testers call them “SUT” or Systems Under Test. That’s your website or web application which needs to be load tested. That’s a SERVER in LoadStorm.
Servers are the target domains of your load testing. For instance, “http://dmoz.loadstorm.net” would be an example of a server.
In order to conduct a load test, the target must be a URL where a web site or application resides. We simply call this the “server”, and it should not be confused with a specific piece of hardware. You may create as many test plans as you wish against a particular server.
A Server is a Logical Entity
Servers can be hardware machines running in a data center, but LoadStorm considers a server as a logical entity that will receive HTTP traffic during the load test. Physically, it can be a load balancer, 10 web servers, 5 application servers, and 2 database servers. It may only be one web server that contains everything for your site.
It doesn’t matter to LoadStorm because it only needs to know where to send the requests. The goal of the test is to simulate numerous users taking certain actions which is focused on hitting the site’s user interface (GETs or POSTs).
Along with the URL of the server, you provide the protocol and port number. The protocols supported by LoadStorm are HTTP and HTTPS. The port number will default to 80 for HTTP, but you can designate any port you wish for the requests. This can be helpful if you are trying to hide a staging server from public view until ready to launch an application.
Verify Your Server
Our verification process is necessary, and a load test can only be run against a verified server.
The server must be under your control, thus a valid target upon which LoadStorm will generate heavy volume. Otherwise our load testing tool could be used as a weapon for denial of service attacks, and we of course cannot allow that.
It is easy to verify the target server is yours by placing a verification code on your default page or a verification file in your root directory.
Please see the complete instructions on how to verify your server.
Servers Can Be Ignored
If you don’t want to actually send traffic to a domain that is referenced by your pages, then you should ignore that server in LoadStorm.
A good example is a Content Delivery Network. Our customers frequently use a CDN for static images. LoadStorm will detect that your pages are requesting images from the CDN, and during a load test there could be many thousands of hits to the CDN.
Since static images delivered from a CDN are the fastest responses and do not factor into the performance of your web application, most of our customers prefer not to hammer on the CDN. Thus, they ignore the CDN server. This will tell LoadStorm not to initiate requests to that server.
Google Analytics is ignored by default. If your pages are calling Google Analytics through a JavaScript, those hits are probably not desirable for counting in Analytics because they invalidate your marketing measurements.