Category: Load and Stress Testing

How Load Testing Improves Web Performance

Most business owners are well aware of how important it is for them to include developments of websites into their operations’ plans of business activities. After all, competition is surging in today’s Internet marketplaces; however, it is also imperative to note that many of today’s businesses are shifting to utilizing methods of online activities/interactions with their respective client/customer bases. This enables them to reach a vast array of types of people from all across the world and puts a premium on performance. Unfortunately, the competition that exists in today’s competitive online marketplaces is causing many businesses to cease their operations due to not being able to sustain their operations. Customers are choosing to do business with companies who have proven themselves well into their markets and often this is determined by how prior customers/clients have reacted to what they have to offer.

Many people will often claim how certain websites they visit are much faster than others. This is often due to the faster websites utilizing “load testing.” Many people will often claim that they know a lot about load testing and spout a bunch of load testing info as if they’re a web performance engineer. The truth is that load testing is a really complex thing, but it can be easier if you do your research on sites that offer free information like www. loadtesting.co. Getting the most information you can get about load testing.

Common misconceptions have been that software testing provides playback and records that are capable of utilizing “testing tools” for regression. These particular tools analyze stacks of entire OSI protocols, whereas the majority of regression tools for testing focus primarily on GUI performances. As an example, regression testing tools playback and record mouse clicks on buttons of eb browsers, but the tools of load testing send out specific hypertexts the web browsers deliver after users click on buttons. In a multi-user environment, tools of load testing hypertexts are sent out for several users with every user having login ID’s that are unique with passwords.

By implementing “load testing” into the protocols of your web designing processes, you will be able to benefit from having a website(s) that exceeds the performance measures of many other websites that are currently live on the Internet, thus, giving you a great opportunity of generating more leads than other companies who may not necessarily be utilizing such measures of increasing web performance.

Using Tsung For Load and Stress Testing

In web development load testing entails putting demand on a web service or website and assessing its response. Load testing is usually used to observe how the website will perform under peak load. Modern web developers have numerous options for performing load testing on their websites. There are cloud based options such as loader.io, Cloudtest, NeoLoad, WebLOAD and Silk Performer. There are other options which can be run on a local network such as Apache JMeter, BlazeMeter, Tsung and Gatling. In this article we will look at Tsung in detail and the various pros and cons that one may encounter.

Tsung is an open source load and stress testing tool. It is written in Erlang, which is a language suited for concurrency, allowing it to better utilize CPUs that have multiple cores. Tsung supports various protocols such HTTP, HTTPs, LDAP, SOAP and XMPP. Tsung can also be used to stress test PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. Tsung can also monitor operating system performance metrics such as memory, network traffic and CPU utilization using Erlang agents, Munin or SNMP. Tsung provides HTML reports that displays performance of the system during the load test.

Tsung is only available on Linux. On Ubuntu installing Tsung is as simple running sudo apt-get install tsung. On other Linux distributions you can install Tsung from source or using the deb files from Github. Load tests are created using XML files and running tsung with the file as a parameter. The XML file allows you to specify the number of requests to be made, the number of CPUs to use and the IP and port of the server. If you don’t want to worry about configuring an XML file, you can use a service like LoadViewTesting.

You can also specify the arrival rate of the requests to the server being tested. Requests arrive randomly modelling real life operation of the server. Requests to the server can also be made depending on your website. You can create JSON requests and XML requests. Tsung can also create dynamic requests that change based on a percolator engine (this doesn’t need to be configured with LoadView). Another interesting feature in Tsung is the distributed feature. Install Tsung on all multiple clients and you get a report of the server’s performance to under distributed load.