Load Testing - An Effective Measure To Avoid Bugs In Your Website

First of all, let us know what actually Load Testing is. It is the process that is followed to put demands on a particular system or device, and measure its response. This type of software evaluation is performed for determination of the behavior of a definite system under normal circumstances as well as during anticipated conditions of optimal load. The process also helps in identification of the operating capacity of any application along with bottlenecks and technical glitches (if any) that are responsible for any degradation or hindrance of normal activity whatsoever.

Let us discuss some of the load testing measures that you need to take in order to avoid the presence of bugs in your websites.

Early Start
The planning of the load evaluation needs to be started pretty early – during the designing phase. This is to ensure that you are not caught off guard during the development owing to any uncalled for incidence. The thumb rule is that you need to carry out your work with a notion that there will be issues and problems to encounter.

Do not make underestimations as this may prove extremely costly. The two most common underestimations that people generally tend to make are on the number of mistakes that are to be taken care of and the nature of the mistakes that will have to be rectified.

Defining the Environment
This is another step that needs to be taken to keep bugs at bay. You need to define the testing environment and for that you need to assess the kind of effort that is required. It is also imperative that a separate environment for the evaluation, suitable for production is created. It is to be seen that the configuration of the machine, its speed, as well as the set up are same as otherwise; extrapolation of performance becomes virtually impossible. One of the most important tasks is reducing the uncertainty and answering certain questions with some conclusive evidences. But for any comparable hardware, you can at the best make some wild guesses, which most of the times, are far from accurate.

Load evaluation of an application generally ensures that the application is ready to perform once it is live. Generally, this type of testing answers the following questions in a proper and conclusive way:

• Whether the application will crumble when subjected to stress and load
• Can all the pre-defined targets of performance be met
• How many users can handle the website in question one at a time

Performance related issues are quite common. These issues emanate from the following reasons:

• Issues regarding software configuration
• Poor quality of network configuration
• Poorly optimized and improper software coding

A proper load evaluation process saves the companies from financial loss resulting from poor performance of the software and the interruption of service it causes. While testing, it is imperative to take into account the following points:

• Potential loss of the customers, partners and clients
• Reduction of employee productivity
• Damage to the corporate or brand value
• Unnecessary expense of acquiring hardware that are not needed
• Extra cost for fixing issues in case of any emergency
• Setting up inappropriate contingency plans that only increases the expenses

A typical load testing software would avoid all these issues. Besides, it has the following benefits:

• Low licensing fees
• An ergonomic graphical interface, that will reduce the man hours needed for manual testing
• Substantial reduction of hardware costs, due it its cross platform capabilities that allow the loads or stresses to be generated on a variety of platforms or domains

Hence, from the technical point of view, load testing provides a lot of advantages the users when it comes to recording the business actions that are performed within a particular web application with a view to keep the bugs at bay.

You can hire testers from top load testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide automated load testing services. If you would like to hire certified load testers from us or would just like to speak to one of our expert software testers, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 5 Load Testing Tools Available That Testers Should Consider

Load Testing is the mechanism or process of putting simulated demand or stress on a system or a device and evaluating along with measuring its extent or quality of response. Load testing can be performed for determining the behavior of a system under anticipated optimal stress conditions as well as under normal circumstances. This type of testing helps in the identification of the maximum operating capacity of a particular application along with any technical issue, bottleneck or element that may cause the application to disintegrate.

Now when it comes to tools that are used for stress testing, you will find a lot of them. However, let us discuss top 5 of them that are used the most and are considered the most effective.

Apache JMeter

It is one of the most popular open source software packages for stress testing that is extensively used to analyze the performance of various web applications. The tool is so designed to be integrated or embedded with the test plan. However, due to further development along with incorporation of a few value added features, the testing scope of Apache JMeter has further widened. At present, the tool can be widely used to test various functional performance of the applications as well as systems. However, you will need to have Unix or Windows OS for the tool to work.

NeoLoad

This load, as well as performance evaluation software is a JAVA application that is available in two different languages – English and French. It is primarily used to evaluate the performance of websites under trying conditions. The software actually increases the traffic to the website under question and thus evaluates as well as analyzes the performance under optimal load. However, for functioning the tool would need MS Windows, Solaris, Linux Operating Systems.

LoadRunner

This is a software that is developed as well as designed by HP and is extensively used for determining the performance of a particular system at the time of heavy traffic load. The tool is capable of creating as well as handling over thousands of users simultaneously. It can also provide information in respect of performance that is based on infrastructure. This HP product is comprised of several tools that include VUG or Virtual User Generator, Analysis & Controller, Load Generator. It is compatible with MS Windows as well as Linux OS.

LoadUI

It is a cross platform tool that can be used to measure as well as gauge the performance of the web applications. The software would allow an application tester to create as well as configure the tests besides allowing the individual to update while testing an application. The tool is designed to automatically update whenever an application undergoes any modification or change. It comes up with a drag and drop feature, that offers a virtual assistance to the tester. The tool is open source and hence can be downloaded free of cost. It is widely accepted mainly because of its ability to provide comprehensive testing facilities pertaining to different kinds of web based services as well as applications along with different APIs like REST. It is not a static testing tool and hence the tests cannot be created, updated or configured during run time.

WebLOAD

WebLOAD is another variety of cross platform tool (a tool that can be used across a wide variety of platforms) that is used for stress and load testing. The tool provides a wide range of information pertaining to the functionality along with the exact capability of a web application when it comes to withstanding and countering load or stress, especially over a long period of time. The software is specifically used when there is a high demand and requirement for stress or load testing. It is considered one of the most effective tools that is ideal for thoroughly testing various types of web applications subjected to heavy traffic load.

You can hire testers from top load testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide load testing services. If you would like to hire certified load testers from us or would just like to speak to one of our expert software testers, please reach out to 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.