Our Professional Services team has been extremely busy over the past several months helping Customers prepare for what proved to be a very busy online shopping season. I’d like to share with you a couple of unique challenges that we came across and how we were able to use the BrowserMob platform and some special customizations in order to successfully test what normally would be impossible using just Selenium or a traditional http-based testing approach.
File Uploads
Consider scheduling your load tests for up to 60 minutes. You can always stop the test earlier. By scheduling it for 60 minutes, you retain the option to run the test longer or even pause/resume the test, effectively getting a second test for free. The cost of a shorter test, i.e. 5, 10, or 15 minutes, is the same as a 60 minute test, so there’s really nothing to loose.
As you’ve likely seen, we pulled together a comprehensive list of load testing best practices for you to visit, and revisit, at your convenience to help you maintain high performance websites and applications that keep your customers happy.
As helpful as we hope these guidelines are, we know sometimes our readers want to hear how load testing works from the end users themselves. We’ve compiled a few best practices that have come right out of the mouths of customers using our load testing services:
Test different types of traffic at different times of the day.
We are happy to announce that we recently added support for Firefox 7 to our monitoring and load testing products! You can now explicitly specify the Firefox version your script will run against. Currently we support both Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 7.
For example, the following script will open the Firefox 7 browser and navigate to a url:
var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser("FF7");
browserMob.beginTransaction();
browserMob.beginStep("Home Page");
selenium.open("http://seleniumhq.org/");
browserMob.endStep();
browserMob.endTransaction();
The same is possible when using the Selenium 2.0 API (WebDriver):
Hello Readers!! It gives me immense pleasure in meeting you with yet another article on WebDriver. WebDriver has been creating a lot of buzz among the Selenium community lately and BrowserMob, an active member of the Selenium community, wasted no time in announcing its support for the WebDriver API.
I hope you had the chance to read the great introduction article on the Webdriver API by fellow blogger Ben.
In this article I would like to touch on the basics of scripting with the WebDriver and the BrowserMob API.
I’m sure many of you, who are new to this API are asking yourselves these questions just like I did.
A LinkedIn user recently posed the question: “What are the best practices for monitoring, collecting and analyzing traffic data for a large content site?” Ian White, lead engineer at Neustar, jumped into to tell readers why active monitoring is just as important as analytics. Website monitoring ensures your site is functioning properly anytime from anywhere.
Below we’ve outlined a few of his key points that will help you monitor your site so you can sleep well at night knowing your website is always up and running.
Thanks to Dave Thompson for sharing his experience with using BrowserMob to test the performance of a Flex app. To read the full article, check out it here.
It’s almost that time of year again. Holiday shoppers looking to stay at arm’s length from the seasonal mall madness will undoubtedly turn to the Internet to make their gift purchases. In fact, ShopperTrak predicts national retail sales will rise 3% during November and December this year as compared to the same time period last year.
In order to keep up with this expected spike in website traffic, there are a few steps ecommerce companies should take to ready their site. In order to help, we’ve rounded up the top eight load testing and website monitoring tips to help ecommerce sites stay on their “A-game” this holiday season.
Looking for a way to keep up on website performance best practices, load testing tips and all things related to the success of your websites and applications? Then join us for our new BrowserMob office hours.
We’re pleased to announce that starting October 7, SMEs from our Engineering, Professional Services, Customer Service and Sales teams are at your service for one hour on the first Friday of every month. Feel free to pick their brains and ask anything that’s on your mind. They’re happy to share success stories and lessons learned from their work with other customers.
From 1:01 am to 3:01 am PDT on Sept 18, 2011 the data center that houses our secondary queue server became inaccessible from all monitoring locations. During the outage we were not running any monitoring jobs. At this time everything is running normally and our network ops team is working to determine the root cause.
Normally an outage of one of our queueing clusters would not be an issue, as we have both automatic and manual failover policies in place. But this time we were in the middle of migrating the physical server of our primary queue server and were unable to switch over. There are a few spots we have already identified where we can improve our infrastructure to prevent any further outages like this.
Recent Comments