Top 4 Case studies – Missed to do Load Testing and failed miserably thereafter!

For automation of core business processes, most of the businesses go for applications. But prior to making the application available for customers, partners, stakeholders or employees, it should be understood whether the application can acceptably perform under peak load conditions. Herein lays the significance of load testing. It helps you to avoid unnecessary investments through adequate application capacity planning and tuning. Companies may experience serious setbacks without proper load testing, as these four case studies will show.

Case One

Customer service is a significant thing and almost all companies are very serious about it. Here we have a case where an organization on a regular basis indulges in evaluation of the satisfaction levels of the clients by means of different feedback mechanisms including surveys. This is followed by required enhancements to maintain high satisfaction levels. The performance and the reliability of the website play a vital role in empowering the organization to render supreme level of customer service. The web infrastructure is extended across a number of servers linked to the internet through manifold backbone providers. This particular company tried testing the performance of the distributed network by allowing people to log on randomly and provide performance report, through running test scripts. But this load testing was a failure because it did not provide a global perspective with respect to the performance. Measurement of certain specific areas only was being done.

Case Two

A particular appliance was installed by a customer on the network for load balancing a service provider’s Application Firewall. It was reported by the customer that the website stress test did not work out on enabling the Application Firewall. It was also stated by the client that the set up was working so far as the test environment is concerned. However, when the same thing was tried with the Website testing tool, it led to failure. Moreover, the firewall did not have any block logs.

Case Three

This case is about a company owning an HTML5 game development portal which ignored load testing and the web portal had to be again pulled back into beta testing. As the portal was taken out of the beta and put into the live world, several problems cropped up with the backend. As a result, the site was unable to scale at a rapid pace to keep in line with the load. It was an uncomfortable experience for the users who were keen on browsing the website and accessing the games. The organization owning the portal was not prepared enough for the real world usage, and owing to this the launch of the application was a failure.

Case Four

Here we have a company whose content delivery network enables media companies to go for large file delivery of the present age rich media Internet to the clients. Since the organization renders B2B content delivery services, keeping in line with the expectations of the media clients is a must. This can only be done through facilitating content delivery with high performance. For this, monitoring of static content of web pages as well as streaming media with respect to a global end user perspective was required. The company found it difficult to perform appropriate load testing because it did not have servers across the globe set up for testing streaming quality or http service. As a result, the organization failed to evaluate the stream quality as well as performance of its Windows Media Video and Flash Media servers.

Load and stress testing, when appropriately performed through an application’s development cycle goes a long way in reducing the count of failures affecting the application. This is a very essential aspect, especially when the application is customer facing and in involved in interaction with an external audience.

We provide software performance testing services. If you would like to hire performance testers from our team, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 4 Case Studies – Why missing out on Load Testing can be disastrous!

Each enterprise wants to beat its competitors by launching a powerful website. So it always explores options to optimize the look, feel, performance and scalability of the website. In addition to keeping the visitors engaged, the web application also needs to handle the constant fluctuations in the size of the website traffic. No enterprise can predict the exact number of users who will simultaneously access its website. Therefore, it must load test the website thoroughly to ensure that it is stable, scalable and high-performance. There are many instances when the website development projects failed only due to failure in load testing. These companies could have optimized the performance and scalability of the websites simply by conducting load testing.

Case Study I

Each person wants to participate in the famed New York City Marathon. The people who cannot participate in the hugely popular event keenly follow the runners’ progress during the race. So many websites try to attract users by allowing them to observe the runners’ progress live. A popular online sports portal tried to broadcast the race without implementing a proper load testing plan. The webmasters even ignored to check if the website and web server are effective in handling an enormous size of traffic at average page duration of one second. The absence of a comprehensive load testing strategy made them face one of the worst-case scenarios for the performance of their websites as well as the server load. The webmasters rectified their mistakes, and load tested the application immediately to optimize its performance during the next New York City Marathon.

Case Study II

The owner of a popular online gift card store underestimated the significance of load testing. The entrepreneur even did not realize whether the website and web server are optimized to handle heavy load during busy holiday season. The owner realized the problem only when the website failed to deliver maximum capacity during the peak holiday season. However, the webmaster realized the problem immediately, and hired renowned software testing service provider to identify the problem. After evaluating the system and environment thoroughly, the professionals found problem in a key section of the code that affects the scalability of the web store. The web store owner could have avoided the problem easily thorough load testing during the development and deployment of the website.

Case Study III

Some companies even do not realize the significance of load testing while migrating to a new and advanced system. The new system definitely offers loads on innovative features, functionalities and advantages to an enterprise. A large communication service company failed to avail the benefits of an advanced system as it failed to implement a detailed load testing plan. It invested a huge amount of funds in buying and installing the mission-critical systems. But the systems failed to support the company’s workflow along with a large number of users. The load testers hired by the enterprise identified problem with the hardware. The new system needs higher specification hardware to support a large number of users.

Case Study IV

A popular online action sports network updates its websites at regular intervals without conducting any load testing. New sections were being added to the website to complement promotion and sponsoring of various sports events. At the same time, the website also allows participants to register by submitting information. The participants also have option to create their sports profiles, monitor the activities of competitors, and communicate with promoters and sponsors. After some time, the sports network realized that the website is working at a much slower pace. It hired experienced load testers to determine the nature of the exact problem. The testers prepare a comprehensive load testing plan, and suggested the changes required to optimize the performance and scalability of the website.

Conclusion

In each of the above mentioned cases, websites owners concentrate more on the features and functionality of the website. The enterprises failed to determine if the website is effective in handling a large number of visitors at a time. Some websites like the marathon portal and gift card store need to handle heavy traffic only at certain times. But no webmaster can predict when the website will attract an increasing number of visitors. So most enterprises, nowadays, are integrating load testing as part of the website development strategy. The test-driven development strategy will further optimize the performance and scalability of a website in the long run. Also, the enterprise can avoid maintenances required to meet huge website traffic.

You can hire software testing companies from India after due validation of their skillsets, expertise and experience in handling huge load testing projects to avoid risks associated with letting an amateur do load testing for you.

We provide load testing services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified software testers, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 10 Cloud Computing Load Test and Performance Monitoring Tools

In today’s technologically advancing age, more and more businesses are embracing new and latest techniques of creating a niche in the industry. The latest being the trend of cloud computing. Since its inception, the IT industry especially has embraced the trend that makes business processes easy and swift. The newly evolved approach can easily be termed as an upgraded adaptation of utility computing. A growing number of IT communities have already adapted to the trend and started unleashing their potential at their best.

Today, a good number of cloud based technologies and tools are available in the market facilitating the different facets of IT development. The rapid pace of advancement has also made way for tools catering to varied aspects of testing involving both performance and load management. The benefits of integrating the cloud based tools of testing are many like flexibility of use and cost reduction (usage charges, licensing infrastructure). It also helps you choose the right kind of tool required for the job and start working immediately.

Here is a quick look at some of the acclaimed companies and the top 10 cloud based testing tools and solutions released by them, which help in performance monitoring and load testing:

1. SOASTA: A pioneer in the field of cloud testing, this helps the industries make use of the leading service of web testing for performance optimization and improved reliability and scalability of applications and websites. The CloudTest from SOASTA leverages the cloud resources for facilitating performance monitoring and load testing. Additionally, it also replicates traffic that hits an application or a website from inside or outside the firewall. The effortless integration of the CloudTest’s monitoring, test design, and reporting offers all that you need to produce high quality services and web applications at cost effective rates.

2. Keynote: An internationally acclaimed service provider dealing with mobile cloud monitoring and testing, Test Perspective of Keynote provides comprehensive solutions geared towards the enhancement of online experience. It helps companies analyze the performance of their websites, applications, and content on a diverse set of browsers, mobile devices, and networks. The exclusive business model of Keynote allows you to improve productivity while, controlling costs with the reliable and striking performance of its on-demand measurement and test services and products.

3. Monitis: The Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework is another flexible and comprehensive monitoring solution for the IT industry that is entirely cloud based. This allows consolidating various aspects of monitoring like application, backend, and website facilitating an all-in-one central service. The platform offers easy customization opportunity and can be used for managing a diverse range of IT assets like servers, switches, routers, DNS, processes, websites, databases, VOIP devices, and any other kind of IP devices. This particular solution helps companies get a complete view on the performance and health of their systems.

4. BrowserMob: The monitoring service of this particular provider makes use of real web browsers to replicate the interaction of a user with your website. Irrespective of being equally priced to the monitoring service style of simplistic ‘ping’ that only goes through individual URLs, this takes a step ahead in the service approach. The usage of real browsers enables you to have a check on the response of the individual objects alongside verifying the functionality of your website in its entirety. This particular approach also involves ensuring that third-party components like gadgets, content delivery networks, advertisement, and analytics does not affect your website negatively.

5. Cloudslueth: This particular solution allows businesses to monitor and have a real time check of their own cloud application. All you need to do is submit a particular URL and the service provide will do the monitoring of the cloud application on your behalf. The aspects of availability measurements and live performance are specially monitored.

6. GFI: The MAX RemoteManagement of GFI enables easy monitoring of different aspects of your clients like remote offices, bandwidth usage, servers, ISP connection, raid arrays, and the website. In simple words, this particular service allows monitoring the principle parts of the infrastructure of your network and takes care of the clients proactively maintaining a minimum cost of the hardware avoiding costly downtime.

7. LoadStorm: This particular approach of load testing enables the developers to have complete knowledge about the response of their applications when put under high volume of HTTP traffic. This particular service offers an increasing number of cloud resources in the hands of the developers enabling them to enhance or improve the performance of the applications of the web. With this, you can develop your own test plans and produce maximum 50,000 concurrent users in practical scenarios.

8. InterMapper: The Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer you solutions that are critical to your business and InterMapper ensures the continuous operation of your services in a cost-effective approach. The CloudWatch technology released by AWS gathers the performance metrics for all virtual servers functioning in cloud. InterMapper runs a query of these metrics for monitoring the status of an Amazon ec2 Instance.

9. CloudHarmony: This particular testing solution is still in beta. However, you may make use of the continuously updated extensive list of benchmarks for viewing and comparing the performance metrics from different cloud services and providers.

10. CloudTools: This set of tools allows deployment of various testing and managing JAVA EE applications on Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) of Amazon and VMware environments.

The above-mentioned performance monitoring and load testing tools allow a better analysis of the IT infrastructure maintaining a smooth and swift approach.

The above-mentioned performance monitoring and load testing tools allow a better analysis of the IT infrastructure maintaining a smooth and swift approach. While taking hiring decisions, choose a certified load testing team which has in-depth experience in doing load tests on varying loads.

We provide load testing services. If you have a need to hire software testers, please feel free to ask us about the certifications of our testers. We will be glad to share all our achievements at Mindfire Solutions.

Best Practices for Effective Load Testing

This testing generally estimates an application’s maximum functional capability, whether the existing infrastructure can support the application, the application’s sustainability as measured against peak user load and the count of concurrent users that the system can support along with scalability to ensure accessibility for more users. Since a number of components are involved, load testing requires an effective strategy in order to ensure a successful outcome. Let’s discuss the main steps of load testing before we proceed to look into the best practices. These will be helpful when you seek to differentiate between Load Testing Services providers.

Major Steps of Load Testing

• Planning: It is very important to plan a target load in order to determine whether the application is able to support that load. While planning it is best to make use of a calculator to estimate how many concurrent users are required to attain the target load level. Moreover, proper test account data should be created during the planning phase.

• Configuration: In order to derive the best results, the load test should be properly configured. For configuring the test, you need to consider certain basic things like where your web traffic would be coming from, the number of users coming to the site, how the user load should be applied, whether the test should be conducted with virtual users instead of real users, where within the site users are spending maximum time and how much time users spend on navigation.

• Scripting: One of the major components of load testing is an appropriate load testing script that enables the simulation of real user behavior over the website in an accurate and efficient manner. For scripting, you need to chart out a scenario outline, recognize a practical range of pause times amidst steps and decide whether the script will call for parameterization or randomization.

• Execution: During the execution of load testing, you need to focus on certain metrics that are usually captured while running a load test. Some of the most useful metrics are number of page views, number of successful transactions, types and number of errors, page load times and throughput. While running a load testing, there should be a constant scope of communication among all the responsible parties, namely the developers, database administrators and system administrators.

• Analysis: The aim of any load testing is to find out whether the website or application is facing any capacity or performance issues. If such things happen, you are required to analyze the test result to identify the probable causes.

Best Practices in Load Testing

• While carrying out the different steps of load testing the following best practices can be considered to maximize the success rate.

• While running a load test, ensure that the environment is identical to what it is during recording of the test. If there are any changes in the operating environment, you might need to rerecord the tests.

• In case load tests are conducted on a Siebel application, comprising a list applet, care should be taken to ensure that the list’s expected state is identical during the recording session and the execution session.

• Wherever possible, it is good to break scenarios into a number of smaller components so that the tests are focused. The transaction definitions should be granular enough to enable the identification of performance issues.

• The HTTP message bar traffic needs to be eliminated from transactions. Place the requests for message bar within your script exterior to the transaction blocks.

• If you are planning for iterative actions, ensure that the application is in its base state and the next iteration can begin from there and get completed productively. Moreover, iterative actions should be made self-sufficient.

• Data value parameters should be set up in such a manner so that they are specific for every virtual user. Again, each virtual user should possess a particular data subset within the database.

• Ensure that the position and role of the user are compatible, so that the user can carry out the essential actions.

By appropriately following the best practices, the common pitfalls that clients face during load testing can be conveniently avoided. This ensures better and more successful test results.

We provide software performance testing services. Our certified load testers can help increase the robustness of your application. To know more how, please visit Mindfire Solutions.

Load Testing: The Ultimate Way to Control the Queue

As the current trend goes, developers are into the habit of releasing brand new mobile apps with an aim to generate a queue for the users before a comprehensive support system can be built up for their app to fix evident issues. From the usability point of view, implementing a queue is indeed a great idea. It generates a lot of excitement within your users and also succeeds in adding that exclusivity factor to an application while the developer can deal with the scalability concerns in parallel.

However, let’s have a look at the other side of the coin. Having a queue may indeed be exciting for a few days but making users wait for the applications while the issues are being sorted out may prove to be a very risky bet for the developer or application owner, particularly when the switching cost for a user is very low. This gives a lot of scope to the impatient user to cross out your application and switch over to the subsequent one, without even getting the chance to appreciate the quality of your application.

There is off course a brilliant way to reduce this risk factor, and that’s where Load Testing comes in. It is the process of subjecting your system to high load and participation and evaluating the response. So, before making your application/app public, try to figure out the application’s performance against peak load conditions, maximum anticipated load. This will help you understand whether all the systems will synchronize in the proper manner and manage the burden of the entire user base.

Significance of Load Testing Services

The fundamental goal of Load Testing is to make sure than an application will register a good performance, in the production stage itself. With the help of load testing, you will be able to find out whether you application will cease to function or function inappropriately under heavy load and if the application is sturdy enough to fulfill the pre-determined performance levels. Moreover, load testing also gives a fair idea as to the number of users the website or application can simultaneously handle.

Some of the common performance issues that applications may face are the following:

• Issues related to software configuration (for database, web server, load balancers and so on)
• Problems arising from improper network configuration
• Imperfect software code
• Inadequate hardware assets

The sole means to identify these performance setbacks at the production stage is load testing, i.e., simulating a plethora of concurrent users. It also has a positive impact on the company’s Return on Investment by reducing the financial cost arising out of service interruptions and poor performance.

Generally speaking, this type of testing is most applicable to multiple-user systems, usually those operating on a client-server model, like web servers. But load testing can also be done for other software systems. For instance, you can always verify whether a financial package is suitable enough to process years of data and create a report accordingly or if a word processor can read an exceptionally bulky document.

Things to consider while Load Testing

• The following things need to be considered in order to ensure that your load testing is successful:
• The load goals should be clearly defined and measurable in terms of relevant parameters like requests per second, concurrent users, etc.
• Specify the goals based on real-time scenarios. For example, when you are setting the load goals in terms of number of concurrent users, specify according to the expected number within a particular time span.
• In case your application is brand new and there are no previous or specified server logs, take help from those involved in the company’s promotional activities and decide the peak.
• Set the response time based on the user acceptance quotient.

Load Testing is the ultimate means to identify the shortcomings in your website or application before launching, to ensure that even the user who is the earliest in the queue, is not facing any performance setbacks. In the long run, this will help you rise above the low ratings and unfavorable reviews, and make your application seamlessly sail through.

We provide software performance testing services. Our certified load testers can help increase the robustness of your application. To know more how, please visit Mindfire Solutions.