Web performance testing. Before talking tools, let’s consider load times and the value of performance. 6 new books every software testing engineer should read.
LoadView can help you:. Establish response time baselines under specific user load numbers. Identify performance bottlenecks as the number of simultaneous users increases.
Find upper limits of current systems to plan for future capacity (Capacity Planning). Stress your production environment to see how and when things fail Simulate real users with ease!. Send get and post requests to a web site. Simulate real users browsing a website in a real desktop browser. Emulate mobile devices navigating around a website.
Send requests to a restful API. Global Testing Locations LoadView runs in the cloud from a diverse list of cloud-providers as well as geographically dispersed locations.
If you have concerns about the user experience on your website from a particular location you can set your load test to run from nodes within that region. This is also very beneficial for testing your Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) in each location.
Managed Cloud Setup and Scalability Gone are the days of worrying about managing your cloud instances—we take care of of spinning up nodes in the cloud behind the scenes allowing you to focus on designing your scripts, building your test plan and executing your tests. There’s no need to create or use existing Amazon, Google or Rackspace cloud accounts for your load tests. Simply setup a load test in Dotcom-Monitor and we manage all details related to the cloud. External Network & Server Performance Testing Test the performance of your websites from outside of your network. This gives you greater insight into how your website will perform under different load levels across the internet which eliminates false biases created by only running load tests across your internal network. This also allows you to test the capabilities of your existing network infrastructure including routers, firewalls, load balancers and server farms or clusters. One of the benefits of working with Dotcom-Monitor to setup and perform your load testing is that we have both External and Internal monitoring tools.
When you are performing a load test it’s valuable to not only see how the website performs from the external end user’s perspective, but to see how the server performs under the increased load. The best way to do this with Dotcom-Monitor is to setup a MetricsView agent to monitor the Performance Counters on your Windows or Linux servers. Typically, users will monitor the CPU, Memory usage, bandwidth, disk IO, database response times and any other metrics involved in supporting their web applications. While the cloud based LoadView test is being performed on your web application, the internal MetricsView Agent is collecting valuable performance counters from your servers as well as SNMP data from devices supporting those servers. After the test has been completed, you can then cross reference periods where the external testing nodes experienced slow-downs or other issues with the spikes in values collected in the performance counters. Overlaying these metrics gives you a better picture of where performance bottlenecks exist.
JavaScript and other Rich Internet Application (RIA) Interfaces Many load testing tools are capable of sending get requests to download the basic HTML and element level files, but they fall sort of actually opening, rendering and running interactive media such as JavaScript, Flash or Silverlight. The LoadView tool allows you to record actual interaction with RIA content in a real browser, which means you can point and click to script walking through an RIA web application. Such powerful scripting allows you to verify that not only is the website serving up the proper content, but users are able to effectively interact with the web pages. Test Using Over 40 Mobile Devices and Browsers Most organizations test their web applications in the two or three most popular browsers, but with the rise of mobile devices, there are dozens of different browsers, browser versions, screen resolutions, screen layouts and interactive methods such as multi-touch zooming, swiping to scroll and point to click (mouse-less) interaction. Now you can choose any of these mobile devices to simulate your load tests.
The supported devices include Apple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy, Sony, HTC, Blackberry, Motorola, Amazon Kindle, Nokia and more. Because mobile browsers have taken over 50% of global internet traffic it’s now more imperative than ever to make sure your website continues to function properly under load in mobile browsers. CDN & Geographic Performance Testing Even after you’ve load tested your own hardware, servers and network internally, you still don’t know how the third-party content hosted outside your network will respond under increased user load. Performing external tests allows you to focus a load test on specific geographic regions, thus testing individual Content Distribution Network (CDN) nodes one at a time. This is particularly useful if you know that a large number of frequent visitors to your web app come from one particular region or another. One of the benefits of working with Dotcom-Monitor to setup and perform your load testing is that we have both External and Internal monitoring tools.
When you are performing a load test it’s valuable to not only see how the website performs from the external end user’s perspective, but to see how the server performs under the increased load. The best way to do this with Dotcom-Monitor is to setup a MetricsView agent to monitor the Performance Counters on your Windows or Linux servers. Typically, users will monitor the CPU, Memory usage, bandwidth, disk IO, database response times and any other metrics involved in supporting their web applications. Proactive testing of your CDN is a smart and effective way to vet your CDN provider. If problems are found, you’re able notify your provider and avoid costly downtime. Along with CDN testing, you may want to know how well your website performs from different locations in general. Website performance can differ greatly from one location to the next due to speed and reliability of the local backbone providers among a number of other performance factors.
Performance Load Testing Software
For example, if you plan on launching a new product with a target market in China, it would be in your best interest to perform some load tests and monitoring using locations in China behind the “Great Firewall of China.” Such tests may help you identify a need for additional servers located directly in China behind the firewall. The Great Firewall of China is the common name given to the strict access control the Chinese government has placed upon internet content from within the mainland. The Chinese government has chosen to block or limit traffic from many popular websites such as Google, Facebook and others in order to control visibility of global knowledge and opinion. Being able to test in situations like this is what makes LoadView so valuable.
Database Performance Benchmarking Most modern websites sit on top of or in front of some sort of database, whether a small MySQL database, a large SQL server farm or one of the many noSQL options. Each database is designed with a different type of use in mind.
Computer Load Testing Software
Some databases may be great at committing writes to disk—others are most efficient at serving up recently used data, while other types are optimized for the fasted indexing and retrieval of random data. Whichever database supports your website, it’s wise to run multiple load testing scenarios to see how your website and database perform under different kinds of heavy load. Regardless of your testing scenario or database type, LoadView offers virtually countless testing options to cover nearly all use scenarios.
Load Testing Software
Load Balancer Testing When using a load balancer to distribute users between servers, you want to know how well the load is actually distributed as you increase the amount of simultaneous visitors. There are a few additional ways to help monitor this process such as installing the MetricsView Agent on your network to gather SNMP data from the load balancer itself to monitoring the web server or database traffic on each individual node behind the load balancer.