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 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.