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.

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.

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.

Stay in the driver’s seat and in control!  When launching a new website or application there are many things to consider to get ready to go “live” – and one of the most important aspects is load testing.

Simply put, load testing helps you determine how many customers the website or application will support – before you potentially find out the hard way (i.e. when users actually come to your site and you have to scramble to make last minute capacity improvements).

Following our blog series on Load Testing Best Practices, Webmetrics will be hosting a Twitter Chat for you to ask any and all questions about load testing.

We just wrapped up our five-part Load Testing Best Practices series. We hope you find these steps simple and convenient as you embark on your next load test.

Planning
When planning a load test, make certain you take all variables into account. For instance, before you load test a website or application, you should ask yourself the following: How much load should I test with (stress test vs. load test)? How many tests should I run? Should I test on a real or virtual browser? Once you have answered these, you will be ready to start and configure your test.

Do you know where your website traffic is coming from? How about the percentage of traffic coming from various regions?

A new report from, comScore, a market research firm, found that nearly 24.1% of total number of users visiting Amazon’s retail website in the month of June, came from the Asia Pacific region. Similarly, 24.9% of the total traffic on Apple’s website are from this same region.

As companies continue to expand their brands globally, it becomes increasingly important to keep track of where traffic is coming from, as load times and performance may vary depending on the region.

Introduction

Welcome to the 5th and final blog in our Load Testing Best Practices series. Today we’ll be focusing on how to make sense of your load test once it’s complete and then dig into the data to help locate the cause of any problems you’ve uncovered.

What do we mean by Analysis?

The goal of running a load test is to identify if your website has any performance or capacity issues, and if so to use the test results to zero in on the possible causes. You want to point your developers and system administrators in the right direction to fix the problem.

shopatron_logo

According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, online holiday sales went up 15.5% in 2010 from 2009 and there were six days when online sales topped $1 billion.

Shopatron, a leading retail-integrated ecommerce solution that enables manufacturers to sell directly on their websites while retail partners handle fulfillment, dealt with the surge in traffic commendably—with zero outages.

Before the 2010 holiday rush, Shopatron needed to confirm that new website features—like changes to the checkout—could withstand the kind of increased volume November and December would bring. Our BrowserMob load testing services met Shopatron’s demands, including:

  • Assurance of 99.999% uptime

Welcome to Part 4 of the Load Testing Blog Series. I’ll be focusing on the type of metrics that are captured while a load test is running as well as some best practices to prepare for when running a test. In my experience, the most useful metrics while a load test is running are:

• Number of successful transactions
• Number of page views
• Page load times
• Number and types of errors
• Throughput

Execution Checklist:

Hello Readers!! Welcome back to Part 3 of our Load Testing Best Practices series, which focuses on writing good load testing scripts.

As I’m sure you would agree to, load testing is an imperative part of every development effort. One of the key components to your load testing efforts is a good load testing script that simulates real user behavior on your web site in the most realistic and accurate way possible.

Before you take a deep dive into the scripting, there are few things you need to plan ahead of time.

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