Stress Testing Repository: Websites & Computers

The following article is from Compuware about load testing and performance testing.

"Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR), the technology performance company, today announced that Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) cites that Compuware Gomez’s 360° Web Load Testing Solution offers unique capabilities that are unmatched by competitors. EMA – a leading analyst firm – goes on to say that these capabilities strengthen Compuware’s leadership in the application performance management (APM) market.

In the EMA Impact Brief report titled: “Compuware Gomez’s 360° Web Load Testing Solution Unites Development and Operations with Unique Efficiencies,” EMA Vice President, Dennis Drogseth wrote: “Through a series of judicious acquisitions, well-focused internal development, and a consistent and clear vision, Compuware has evolved its Gomez APM solution to address mainstream requirements across application, Internet and cloud ecosystems which few other vendor dare address, and virtually none can fully equal.”

"This post is part of our ReadWriteWeb Solution Series, which explores specific technologies and industries that use virtualization for critical operations. We hope this expert analysis and discussion will inspire you in use new ways to use virtualization technology within your organization. This post is sponsored by VMware & NetApp. For more, see: Bring Virtualization To Mission-Critical Microsoft Applications."

"Looking to spin up a virtual machine and get that project done in a hurry but not sure what your choices are in terms of cloud vendors?

Here is a listing (not a rating) of some of the top vendors and what they

Amazon

The following is an article about load testing and performance testing posted by Chris Livesey.

"Companies all around the world rely on business applications to execute critical transactions all day, every day. There’s no such thing as a normal day, unusually high demands such as promotional or seasonal trading can be a regular occurrence, making it crucial that these applications’ environments are constantly prepared for the extreme.

Those who are unprepared are vulnerable to service outages, customer dissatisfaction and trading losses - and often when it hurts the most. Successful businesses understand the need to assure service and application availability if they want to retain customers, deliver excellent service and take maximum advantage of the opportunity their market offers.

This is not a theoretical problem - just look at the recent challenges for the London 2012 Olympics and Ticketmaster. Just when everyone wants to do business with you, you’re not available.

The following is an article about load testing from Mu Dynamics.

"Mu Dynamics is making it easier for devs and provisioning teams to validate and test the performance of cloud applications directly from popular PaaS, CMS or web management apps they’re already using.

Mu Dynamics is integrating its Blitz cloud-based load and performance testing solution with Heroku, AppHarbor, Acquia and CloudFlare.

Mu Dynamics’ Blitz is an API-friendly, cloud-based load, scale and performance testing solution that can support mobile, cloud, and web application dev projects by eliminating script creation processes.

"Incorporating a performance testing solution into our customers’ continuous integration model is helping them deliver a high quality experience for their users"
Ajit Sancheti
Co-founder
Mu Dynamics
Blitz allows devs to instantly load test their APIs and cloud apps without creating complex test scripts. In addition, using Google Chrome and Google Analytics, Blitz brings load and performance testing into the development cycle, enabling developers to simply launch a load test of their applications anytime, anywhere.

“Incorporating a performance testing solution into our customers’ continuous integration model is helping them ensure they deliver a high quality experience for their end users,” said Ajit Sancheti, co-founder of Mu Dynamics

The following is a good article from LoadStorm.com about load testing.

"Performance Decreases in 2010 for Top Retail Sites

Everyone wants to know how the big players measure up, hence the countless performance studies on everything from the Fortune 500 to the Internet Retail 500. We here at Strangeloop have done a few of our own. When we undertook our most recent study — a look at the top 2,000 retail sites according to Alexa — we got a few surprises.

Average page load time was 11.21 seconds.
The Alexa-ranked top 100 sites were SLOWER than the overall average, not faster.
Page Speed scores were as poor as expected.
Load Testing versus Performance Testing

Performance Testing = how fast is the system?

Load Testing = how much volume can the system process?

Performance testing seems to me to be much more broad than load testing. Consider:

A web developer can test the speed at which a page renders in a browser, and that is testing performance. Yet, that test would have nothing to do with load.
I might analyze the efficiency at which my database processes a single specific SQL query, and the resulting speed of delivery of the records can be the slowest component of the whole page building process. Measuring that speed is about performance, but only one transaction is involved (small load).

A good article from Mike Breslin about load testing.

"
WHEN ORVILLE AND WILBUR WRIGHT FIRST FLEW OFF INTO the clouds, they knew their newly invented infrastructure needed improvement. Even though they trusted that the underlying aeronautical principle was sound, they gambled on a long-term return on their pioneering investment.

The same may be said today of cloud computing, or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), a versatile tool utilities can use to better manage environmental compliance.

Coping with the intricacies of compliance

This fuzzy new world is slowly coming into focus at some electric utilities. Perhaps not immediately, but the long view shows a path leading to better control of IT expenses over the coming decades, especially to manage heavier data loads emanating from the more digitally driven grid. Other utilities are already seeing big value coping with the intricacies of compliance.

Cloud computing, of course, offers unlimited potential to help customers and utilities work together to better manage load by communicating and controlling consumption via a common platform, the ubiquitous Internet. SaaS can also level the playing field for smaller players such as rural co-ops - giving them big time enterprise software capability without burden of capital outlay, rather a renter's route to high technology.

The following is an article by Apica and Apex about load testing.

"Apica, a leading load testing and performance-monitoring provider for web, cloud and mobile applications, has announced a partnership with Atex. According to the new agreement, Apica’s highly effective application testing and monitoring technologies will be available to Atex’s 1000+ media customers.

Apica’s solutions test, monitor and optimise web, cloud and mobile applications, and give businesses a true understanding of how those applications perform. Failure to deliver performance in an application will have a significant impact on the business. Testing applications both prior to deployment and after launch are critical to ensure uptime and optimal performance levels.

Using Apica LoadTest, Atex’s customers can reduce the risk of project failure due to capacity and load issues by providing a true understanding of how web, cloud and mobile applications will perform under stressed load conditions. Apica WebPerformance offers a complete website performance testing solution and enables users to monitor response times and stay on top of web performance, 24/7. Together, Apica LoadTest and Apica WebPerformance ensure excellence in the web, cloud and mobile.

The following is an article about load testing from Jon Stokes.

"Mu Dynamics has a really good pitch—with the company’s Mu Studio Scale suite, you can losad test your enterprise infrastructure by impersonating, say, a million iPhone users hammering it with your custom iPhone app. Or, you can have the tool navigate through a website, make selections, and even go through a complete sales funnel to checkout. Setting up the tool and installing it involves some help from Mu itself, which is why the audience for it has mainly been enterprise customers in verticals like healthcare, government, and telcos.

About nine months ago, Mu began working on a new product, blitz.io, that could make Mu Studio Scale’s cloud testing capabilities available via a pay-per-use, low-commitment, tiered cloud usage model. So while Mu Studio Scale is an enterprise solution that you buy and install to test your cloud infrastructure, while blitz.io is a cloud solution that you can use to test your cloud apps.

Today’s announcement is that blitz.io support has been added to Heroku, CloudFlare, and Aquia. The Heroku integration has actually been live since late last week, so it’s not clear to me why this news was embargoed until today. But I look forward to trying it out on my side project.

The following is an article about performance testing.

"Given the diversity of mobile devices represented among companies’ employees and customers, MITE can help developers ensure that their Web-based applications function properly for as many mobile users as possible.

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Keynote's Mobile Internet Testing Environment, or MITE, is a desktop-based performance testing tool that measures the performance of mobile Websites from a large range of mobile devices. Given the diversity of mobile devices represented among companies’ employees and customers, MITE can help developers ensure that their Web-based applications function properly for as many mobile users as possible.

I tested MITE Version 2.1 with a handful of mobile-oriented Websites and applications, including our own eWEEK Labs blog, the mobile version of which taps the popular WPtouch Wordpress plug-in. I used MITE to gauge site performance while browsing interactively, as well as with scripts that I recorded and played back through the MITE interface. I also used the product’s remote Keynote wireless agent to browse and run scripts through the network of any of 16 wireless carriers in nine locations around the world.

The following is an article about load testing.

"Apica, a leading load testing and performance-monitoring provider for cloud and mobile applications, today shared its 'Top 10 Tips' for ensuring E-commerce sites are ready for the fast-approaching online holiday shopping season. According to research firm comScore, in 2010 E-commerce B2C product sales totaled $142.5 billion, representing eight percent of retail product sales in the U.S. Forrester Research estimates that the U.S. online retail industry will be worth $279 billion by 2015. The lion's share of online sales takes place during the holiday shopping season that kicks off on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Is your E-commerce site ready?

Apica offers the following 'Top Ten' recommendations for readying your E-commerce site for the holiday shopping season. Happy shopping and happy holidays!

1. Put vanity aside and reduce the amount of high-resolution images and video on your site in order to minimize response times. If you're too in love with the bulky images, then be sure and invest in systems that can handle short response times despite a high-resolution content.

2. Consider using a CDN / Accelerator service to accelerate the delivery of rich content such as images and videos to customers. These services aren't terribly expensive and the upside is huge.

The following is a blog by libby2w3ea on load testing.

"Do you need to investigate the grade of your application? If yes then you can definitely do this particular easily by using load testing application. You should always try to analyze about quality of your respective software because it is extremely necessary. If you want to protect by yourself from almost any harmful circumstances then you should use this technique of investigating the software program. Some software doesn’t work properly so they have to be tested for great result. You are able to do the process of investigating the any good software through load testing application. This is essential software with the a lot of people because they want for it. Most on the people in the whole world deals with these software similarly some people require these software for his or her business. So the testing software is very important for most of these peoples.

What can be load testing software program?

LoadStorm has a good article on load testing.

"Load Test the Better Way
Cost for 60 Minute Load Test.
Concurrent Users Cost
1,000 $39.90
5,000 $199.50
10,000 $399.00
100,000 $2,999.00

Why LoadStorm?

Proven - thousands of happy web developers; review our testimonials.
Easy - no download, no hardware to buy, no license fee, no scripting language to learn.
Realistic - create test plans to fit your requirements, such as login with your test user data.
Visual - real time graphs with performance metrics (e.g average response time, error rates).

TRY IT NOW - NO RISK, NO CREDIT CARD!

You can be load testing in 15 minutes. Start now - sign up for a free account!

Click on the Free Account button.
Enter your name and email.
Activate via email link.
Watch the tour video.
Create a test scenario for your site.
Run a load test.
Analyze the test results.

LOAD TESTING CUSTOMERS

Load Testing Resources

25 Performance Test Articles

Load Testing Downloads

Load Testing Success Criteria

Load Test Blogs

Load Testing

Load Testing Metrics

LoadStorm has been awarded and recognized as the Best Load Testing Tool by Webhostingsearch.com, the leading provider of best quality web hosting
reviews on the Internet."

Best Load Testing Tool - Happy Customers Prove It

The following article is about load testing.

"When the starter’s pistol signals the beginning of the 2011 ING New York City Marathon on November 6th, fans everywhere will race to the web to track the progress of their favorite runners. And like the marathon itself, the site will play host to some heavy traffic. Thanks to Web Performance's load testing consultants, the site’s servers will have no problems speeding through the increased load.

Consultants from Web Performance set up the site to interface with Google Maps, allowing visitors to follow runners’ progress in real-time. The site’s initial configuration—built to handle 30,000 concurrent users with an average page duration of less than two seconds—initially included nine web servers and three database servers, with a single load-balancer distributing load. After conducting a thorough initial assessment, however, Web Performance increased the array to a more realistic twelve web servers and four database servers.

“Web Performance’s service was outstanding,” says Diego Marin of NYRR, the race association that organizes the NYC Marathon and an intensive calendar of other races throughout the year. “Their engineers went beyond stress testing to help me pinpoint potential bottlenecks within my environment.”

The following is an article on load testing by Steve Wexler.

"Compuware is now shipping a new load-testing offering that is expected to reshape the market. Compuware Gomez 360° Web Load Testing leverages testing solutions – Gomez Web Load Testing and dynaTrace Test Center Edition – to find and fix performance and scalability problems across the entire application delivery chain. The company says the integrated solution accelerates time-to-market by identifying user experience performance problems and isolating the root cause down to the line of code.

In July, Compuware paid $256 million to acquire fellow application performance management developer dynaTrace Software. dynaTrace 4, the first new APM platform release in two years, was announced just weeks after the acquisition. The company had 400 customers, while Compuware has more than 7,000 customers, and revenues of $487 million for fiscal 2011. Compuware shelled out $295 million in 2009 to acquire Gomez, a leader in Web application experience management.

The following is an article about load testing and performance testing.

"Blitz.io is a self service load and performance testing platform. It's a new offering from Mu Dynamics, leaders in the application testing space, and we're thrilled to make Blitz instantly available to CloudFlare customers right now as a CloudFlare App.

Command Line Utility, with Visual Reports
This CloudFlare App appeals mostly to developers, but even less technical members of the CloudFlare team (like me) enjoyed learning about Blitz.io's capabilities and running some tests. There's a reason Blitz.io calls testing Play.

Blitz.io offers a developer-friendly command line user experience. This interface deliberately isn't point and click, since keyboard control gives savvy customers an efficient way to run familiar commands with the power of Blitz at their fingers. The reports, though, are presented visually, for full pattern-recognition power -- see examples below.
How We Found Each Other

The following is an article , written by Vernon, about load testing.

"Analyzing your website traffic is of immense importance for a number of reasons. It is quite crucial to know the number of visitors visiting a website and how did they reach on that specific website. It is very beneficial for a website owner to analyze website statistics often as it helps him to know how a visitor finds the website in search engines and it also helps them to check and track the awareness of their updated site content. Moreover one should have a complete idea as to how to interpret the data. Several web hosting services aid you with essential web traffic statistics for which you need to interpret it and must use it relevantly. The data given by the web hosting companies may be overwhelming.

But then you should apply it to your particular website or business. Initially we must begin with the most fundamental information as to how many visitors visited your site on everyday, weekly and monthly basis. The number of visitors shows how your website is working. It just means, the greater the number of guests to your website the better is your website doing, but anyways this can be an incorrect observation. For this you even need to check the behavior of the guests when they visit your website in order to accurately judge the effenciency of your website.

website monitoring

The following is an article about performance testing.

"Compuware has updated its Gomez Web Load Testing platform to include tools from recently acquired dynaTrace, allowing customers to perform end-to-end tests on web applications.
Compuware Gomez 360-degree Web Load Testing combines the Gomez load testing tool with the dynaTrace PurePlath platform so that enterprises can test loads at granular levels and view performance data at the individual transaction level.
Further reading
Compuware integrates Google Page Speed into Gomez platform
Compuware modernises mainframe environment
Compuware targets end-to-end cloud delivery
Web application developers and administrators will be able to test how an application holds up under high demand when multiple transactions are being processed, the firm said.
Jeff Loeb, vice president of product marketing for Compuware's Application Performance Management unit, told V3 that the update is the first major integration between dynaTrace and Gomez products, and that more updates will follow.
"It allows you to look at every individual transaction and capture all the attributes associated with that transaction," he said. "It is an industry first in getting this 360-degree view."

The following is an article about load testing.

"Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR) Wednesday introduced the industry’s first load testing solution that enables organizations to find and fix performance and scalability problems across the entire application delivery chain – from the First Mile to the Last Mile.

Compuware Gomez 360° Web Load Testing brings together two industry-leading testing solutions, Gomez Web Load Testing and dynaTrace Test Center Edition, into one integrated offering.

This new solution accelerates time-to-market by quickly identifying user experience performance problems and isolating the root cause — down to the line of code. This saves time and money by enabling collaboration across organizations throughout the application lifecycle and reducing testing iterations.

The following is an article about load and performance testing.

"Best practices have demonstrated that testing must start as early as possible in the application development process. This rule also applies to load and performance testing. Performance issues often appear because of weaknesses in the architecture that can slow the entire application down, and resolving the problem can become costly. Thus, fixing the problem as early as possible can save a huge amount of time and effort. In general, companies with web or internal applications do not focus enough on building a strategy for load and test performance because of lack of time and complexity of tooling. Microsoft Visual studio 2010 provides integrated tools to measure, improve and verify application performance under the most demanding conditions. InCycle invites you to a webinar to discover different load and performance testing strategies with Visual Studio 2010, and learn how to use unit and web performance tests to generate and run load test scenarios. A key benefit of load and performance testing with Visual Studio is that you will utilize tools within an environment your team is already familiar with, and will be using the same testing framework already used by your developers. We will demonstrate how easy it is to quickly learn and make use of the testing tools provided in Visual Studio.

The following is an article about load testing, written by Don MacVittie.