Since most of our readers are software/web developers with global reach, we want to share with you info about an upcoming international conference where you can learn cool new coding techniques and hang out with some rock stars in the developer industry. LoadStorm is a proud sponsor of this software development conference and is offering 5,000 free virtual users in our stress testing tool to attendees! Plus Save 200 Euro! Simply use the promotion code “LoadStorm200” when registering for the conference. Follow this link for details regarding this free stress testing sponsorship and to register for the conference. Between November […]
When will retailers learn? When will marketing departments going to consider the technical ramifications on their campaigns and launches and have their load tested? When will the IT department escalate performance engineering to a high priority? When will we stop reading about sites crashing under heavy volumes of traffic? Hopefully never! Because these stories are great examples why you need LoadStorm. Target Inc.’s website crashed yesterday due to special promotion. Apparently, the discount retailer has cut an exclusive arrangement with an Italian luxury designer called Missoni, and it would seem that the online sale of Missoni knitwear generated enough buyers […]
A rumor has swept around the world this week through Twitter and Facebook that Jason Buksh, performance consultant, is going to be an ongoing guest blogger for LoadStorm. That rumor has apparently been substantiated! You heard it here first. We look forward to many useful insights from Jason. So, please welcome our newest performance test expert blog contributor here at LoadStorm.com. As his first contribution (other than his insightful interview), he sent me this funny cartoon about stress testing.
In 1948, Indian Motorcycles asked my father if he wanted to be a dealer for them. The rest is history. I grew up riding dirt bikes, racing at field events, and rebuilding a few classic cycles. My dad always wore a helmet and made sure I did too. Sometimes the helmet he gave me wasn’t very cool, but I was sure it was best for me because he told me stories of guys that didn’t wear them. Sad news caught my eye today about a guy protesting the helmet law in New York. Unfortunately, while he was riding in a […]
Back in 1986, I had no idea who H. Ross Perot was. Nor did I really care. However, he not only played a unique role in American politics back in the 1990s, but he also was instrumental in the forming of the global technology powerhouse known as CustomerCentrix, LLC. By extension, he was critical to the development of LoadStorm because CustomerCentrix is our parent company. Therefore it is only fitting that today we honor the 80th birthday of one H. Ross Perot, founder of information technology giant Electronic Data Systems (EDS). EDS was purchased by General Motors in the eighties […]
It seems like weekly that we hear of some very high profile website performing poorly or going down completely. Are site outages reported somewhere centrally? If so, I haven’t found it. However, this one caught my eye because I’m a sports fan. Saturday night both ABC.com and ESPN.com were poster children for website outage. Many people on Twitter were complaining and tweeting jokes about the performance of both sites. ESPN Crashes on Saturday Night, As Does ABC.com is a quick summary on the outage as well. However, searching the ABC website on terms like “downtime Saturday”, “outage”, “site down”, etc. […]
Stress tests are good for finding out how many people can be on your website at the same time. A good test plan for an e-tailing site includes scenarios that represent people browsing your product pages and searching for specific items. It should also have realistic traffic for buyers going through the shopping cart experience and purchasing products with a credit card. I had a call yesterday from a customer that wanted to stress test his e-commerce site with about 100,000 concurrent users. He explained that their marketing department is expecting significant growth of their sales because of a combination […]
A successful website fails quickly. Successful with high volumes of visitors. Failure in performance under load. Lots of marketing money and energy wasted. Web Performance (fast response) is important – 46% of people abandon sites because of slow load times. If load testing and performance engineering was easy, my boss wouldn’t have hired a geek like me. A swimsuit model would have gotten my job. Google found that an extra 500ms in latency cost them 20% of their search traffic. If you give someone a web application, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to […]
On February 4, 2004, an enviable fellow geek shared a strange new website with the rest of the world that would literally impact everyone’s class reunions forever. Today is the 7th birthday of Facebook. Sites Can Grow Exponentially The four founders were Harvard students and started the site from their dorm room. The idea was only for college students. It’s immediate popularity drove them to expand to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford – within 1 month! It only took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million active users!! It is not hyperbole to say that this single web application not […]
This may not work for non-English speakers, but Cambridge University presents the following paragraph: Olny srmat poelpe can raed this. I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed […]