Your company’s rollout of its new web application. This web application is well designed and appealing. It was also tested by your quality assurance group. They have spent a lot of money marketing your new website. The website is now live. Very soon you will notice that your new web application can not reach in a position, your typical production load and the response times and performance scale, completely unacceptable levels. Your Web logs show that most visitors to your site just leave the new site before you buy anything, because their reaction times are very poor. You start to panic, and one of your friends tells you that the reason your application is running is appropriate that you do not have enough hardware. Hearing this, you decide to add more server hardware. This has a small effect on site response time, it is still inadequate. They soon realize that problem does not really lie with the hardware, but on the contrary with the web application itself. It appears that your Web application optimized not good for the typical peak loads. It is increasingly clear that most of your marketing dollars have been wasted. Enter the world of performance and load testing. To ensure that your application scales as the load increases, it is necessary tests where your application against a simulated load, similar to the actual load that it be exposed if it is exposed to the outside world, is testing carried out. It is important to distinguish between functional or regression testing and load or performance testing. Functional and regression testing is used to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your site works as intended. Stress on the other gauges how well does your website if it is a great burden, as a large number of simultaneous users undergo. Load and performance tests require the use of automated testing tools. It is impractical, if not ridiculous to try to simulate a load of 200 concurrent users by a group of 200 people sit on 200 machines and try to perform operations simultaneously. Before you begin any type of load and performance testing, you need to test scenarios, you need to be determined automatically. A load testing tool will typically record web requests and responses based on user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your site or application that draws take place, the tool all web transactions. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script. Alternatively, you can create the tool manually, the script. Typically, a combination of the two testers. Use the recording mechanism to the basics of their skeleton to generate scripts and then manually change to take account of the scripts specific scenarios. The load-testing tool, it should also allow the tester to simulate bandwidth limited situations. This means, for example, that it would use the exact model user, the application on a slow modem connection. He is also the testers to the script with random data from large amounts of data external drive. Load testing scripts can either graphical or textual in nature. Good load and performance testing tools need not be the testers, programmers. Testers who are not familiar with programming, with scripts that can be manipulated to work graphically. Graphical script is usually all recorded steps show in the form of a hierarchical structure and testers would be one of the steps to change to change the recorded script. Tester, the knowledge in programming may want to have to manipulate their scripts by editing the code. This tester would be to code in a known programming language such as JavaScript, VBScript, or C written work Once your script has been created, you can introduce to specialized controls. These checks have to be a rule specifically related to the application being tested. For example, you might want to check whether the reaction is by a particular Web request returned satisfies some editorial criteria. This would mean, Check Point, the placement of a text. A text checkpoint to check whether a particular segment of text is present or not present, in a certain part of the web page. After you create the script, the script would normally try to ensure on your own computer as a single user that the test script is completed as planned. You are now ready to implement a performance based load test. A good load testing tool that allows the testers to fine tune the performance of the test. This means that it allows the tester to the number of concurrent virtual users to choose how the script on ramps, as ramps and how long it runs. He is also the testers for different groups of concurrent virtual users that have their own ramp, steady state and ramp down to create properties. A good test tool that allows the user to distribute the load across multiple machines, since a single machine may only be able to scale up to several hundred users. To understand the behavior of the web application is loaded, it is also important for the load-testing tool to allow the tester, the performance characteristics of the external components such as operating systems, web servers, databases etc. This allows the length users to see how the performance of his application correlates with the performance of the external component. This type of analysis allows the tester to the cause of performance bottlenecks relatively easy to identify. During testing, the tester should be able to graph the performance in real time for the performance metrics, transaction response time as the term HTTP responses per second failed because the HTTP code (eg 200, 404, 500, etc.), grouped passed transactions per second, transactions per second, total transactions per second, requests per second should, pages per second etc. The tester can also be downloaded, described the simultaneous display of the performance characteristics of external components. For an operating system that could be something like the% processor time, for a database, it could be the number of write operations per second. At the end of the test, would indicate the tester is usually capable of, and save this data as a report for further analysis. Load and performance tests to simulate the behavior of your application under a typical production environment. This allows you to plan your hardware implementation strategy effectively and ensure that your application will deliver the expected performance characteristics. Rolling a Web application that would not test their performance under expected production loads are similar to crossing a road blindfolded. Load testing is an essential part of the development cycle of a Web application and should never be overlooked.
Website Performance And Load Testing
Umair Khan is founder and chairman of Verisium, Inc., a manufacturer of vPerformer, an application for performance and load testing of Web applications.