A blend of opinions & news on tech topics like cloud, mobile, big data, app development and app performance from geniuses inside the technology industry.
An eCommerce site that crashes 7 times during the Christmas season, being down for up to five hours each time it crashes is a site that loses a lot of money and suffers reputation damage. It happened to one of our customers, before we started working with them. They shared their story and what they learned at our annual perform conference earlier this month. Among several reasons that led to these crashes I want to share more details on one of … [Read more...]
Load Tests are great. They tell you whether your application can handle the simulated load by staying within the acceptable response times for the tested transactions. When just looking at the average response time as measured on the web servers it will be hard to tell Do we have a performance problem at all? How can we improve the performance? The following shows a typical graph you get from a load testing tool or by analyzing your web … [Read more...]
As I was learning how to design and execute load tests, an experienced load tester told me the one rule you needed to be able to judge the effectiveness of a test execution: If something didn’t go wrong with some part of the application and/or infrastructure during the test, there was likely something wrong with the test you ran. Your company has spent months designing and writing a new application build and is ready to start testing it. … [Read more...]
In part one, I discussed the importance of understanding the benefits ramping load can have on web load test results. In this post, I’ll discuss best practices for determining how long to ramp at the beginning of a web load test. The general the rule of thumb for load test ramping is the slower the ramp the better. Of course, given time and cost restraints, the goal of most testers is to run the most effective test possible in the least … [Read more...]
In load testing, ‘ramping’, the process of gradually increasing the number of virtual users and load at the beginning and throughout a test, is a recommended best practice. Ramping allows the load to be increased slowly so performance can be measured at different load levels. It also is vital in identifying performance bottlenecks and breaking points of an application. Why Web Load Test Ramping is Important It is important to understand … [Read more...]
