As you all know, BrowserMob utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and open source software to power our services – in fact, BrowserMob couldn’t have been started without it.  We have put together a case study about our work with Amazon, highlighting the ways that it is helping us save you money.

Our approach to load testing depends on launching thousands of instances in short order, and AWS fits that model perfectly.

Leveraging Amazon EC2 On-Demand and Spot Instances, we start by launching a baseline of On-Demand instances to ensure the capacity will run for the entire duration of the test – always looking ahead 5 minutes to determine capacity needs. We’ll attempt to launch a Spot Instance first at a lower bid price, but if the instance doesn’t launch within the first 5-7 minutes, BrowserMob will attempt to run On-Demand.

Spot Instances provide two advantages: First, we get a lower price when the capacity is available, and second, we get extra capacity when the On-Demand market is saturated.

With the combination of Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances, BrowserMob is able to run approximately 1000 Amazon EC2 instances for less than one hour intervals twenty to thirty times every day. And of course, we are always able to further expand our Amazon EC2 usage when necessary to meet the needs of its customers.

For example, we actually ran 5,000 Firefox browsers on 2,300 CPU cores within Amazon EC2 in order to load test an online gaming Website that was promoting the launch of a major movie.

We’re also exploring options to create additional cost savings through Amazon EC2 Spot Instances by allowing customers the flexibility to determine their own service needs in relation to the current Spot Price.

Let us know if you have any specific questions about how we work with Amazon. The full case study can be found on the AWS website here: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/browsermob/?ref_=pe_8050_19833900

Often times website outages cost a company money, and depending on the type of website this can calculation can be simple or difficult. If an e-commerce website goes down for an hour one can simply use the normal volumes to calculate the cost, but for reservation systems this can be more complex. For instance, if an airlines reservation system goes down the real cost both lost bookings and the cost of call operators.

“Of course when the web goes down, people are going to turn to the call centre and that’s why we were for a brief period this morning getting swamped there,” said Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s vice-president of culture and communications. (via Calgary Herald)

The cost of having a human being take a phone call for reservations is much greater than that of a website booking. A quick look for articles yielded this insight from Travel Procurement:

Cost savings is a major driver. PhoCusWright (3) estimated a self-service booking without manual intervention runs between $4 and $8, while a call center phone reservation can be between $15 and $65. (via Travel Procurement)

So not only did WestJet lose some bookings, but they also incurred greater costs in salaries and phone bills. Something to take into consideration next time you’re trying to calculate the cost of your website going down.

IT World mentioned BrowserMob in an article on Open Source load testing tools. They did have a little trouble figuring out our “Open Source” credentials. Needless to say, Patrick has been a big advocate of open source tools, and is well known as part of the Selenium project. The service we offer utilizes those tools to allow users to create their own load testing scripts. We are big fans of Open Source and rest assured that we will continue to contribute to the community.

CMSWire, the place to go for all things content management, wrote up a fine article on why small business should us BrowserMob for load testing.

If It Crashes, They Can’t Come

If your website is your company, then having it go down for any period of time can cripple you. Huge interest in your site can see the server(s) unable to cope with demand.

Your new product launch, interest generated by a story from a major news site, winning an award and other factors can all drive an upswell of visitors to your site. And, if it goes down as they all try to check it out, they’re unlikely to come back.

BrowserMob is here to prevent that by monitoring and stress testing a site — including AJAX and Flash sites — to see if it can handle the load. It can also find fundamental flaws and compatibility issues that could prevent potential customers having a good experience.

It’s a great introductory article for those new to website creation and why load testing is so important. Go check out their home page as well for more CMS industry news.

Given that the government is trying to move online we have started seeing some services get affected by website problems. The unemployment website for Oklahoma City was reported as being down for a second time this month. Apparently there was a server glitch. As we move more services online the government is going to have to become more tech savvy.

But if Cisco is going to have issues with it’s web servers then we can hardly be surprised when small government agencies run into trouble. In the end the best we can do is to hope to minimize downtime due to predictable traffic and monitor sites so that when issues do arise they can be addressed quickly.

Yesterday it was Cash for Clunkers, today it is the USPO that is being crushed under the weight of usage.

Over the past hour, multiple attempts to access the site utilizing two different internet browsers have all resulted in the same “waiting for www.prc.gov…” message at the bottom of the screen.

(via The Examiner)

It appears the site was down for multiple hours so many people turned to Google Docs where somone posted a copy of the list. It seems that government infrastructure isn’t quite ready for prime time.

When President Obama took office he promised greater transparency in government. The technology behind this promise was supposed to be the web, but this demands that the government become competent at hosting high traffic web sites.

Car dealers have been trying to register for since early this morning with no success. Many have been unsuccessful given the sheer volume of traffic being directed to the NHTSA website.  Slow response times and error pages are all most dealers have received so far.   The registration pile-up seemed to ease a bit later in the day as some dealer registration Tweets were sent in to us. (via CashForClunkersFacts.com)

As government moves onto the internet they are going to have to become more more savvy when it comes to rolling out such services. Since Cash For Clunkers was not open to the public it should have been a relatively simple matter to predict the amount of traffic it would receive. There are only a fixed number of dealers in the country, so the traffic spike wasn’t nearly as bad as being Slashdotted.

Going forward let’s hope that somone learns from this experience and begins to do proper testing of government sites.

Yesterday in a press release New Relic announced our partnership.

“Our clients understand the critical impact that poor application performance has on end-user satisfaction and business success,” said Patrick Lightbody, CEO and founder of BrowserMob. “New Relic is the perfect partner for us. The combination of BrowserMob’s browser testing tools–the first of their kind– and New Relic’s monitoring and root-cause analysis capabilities will make it easier for our customers to optimize their web applications throughout the development lifecycle.”

We are very excited about his partnership since it will give our customers a more complete solution for load testing.

We’ve seen a few tests recently from Magento users, and now we know why. Joachim Houtman has written a great post on Magento perfomance tuning over on Yoast that ends with a nice little shoutout.

This article give a introduction how to improve your Magento site performance, none of these tips are revolutionary. Because every website’s scenario is different, when you really want to get the most out of your Magento install you need to hire a professional. The only way to discover the optimal server configuration is testing, a really great tool to use is BrowserMob, load testing with real web browsers so you will able to put even the Magento checkout process under load testing.

So we’d like to thank Joachim for the kind words and welcome members of the Magento community.