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We all know how irritating it is when websites and web services start running slowly. If your website is important to your business then it is essential that the site loads quickly and correctly even when you experience high levels of website users.
Establishing your web site's load capacity is a very simple procedure.
- You give us a list of url's to test and your target of the amount of traffic you need the website to be able to handle
(eg 50 simulatneous users with each user clicking on a link every 15 seconds).
- We prepare the test and schedule a time to run it.
- We run a series of stress tests (starting small and increasing the load with each test) until we identify the point at which your website starts struggling to deliver.
And that's it. If you feel that your website has failed the test then you will know where to start in terms of streamlining the website or increasing server/network capacity. Once you have made enhancements to your systems we can test again.
Once you are satisfied with the general load capacity of your site you may wish to do isolated tests on specific potential problem areas such as shopping cart checkout procedures etc.
Pricing
Costs for load testing are relative to the amount of time spent on setting up the test, plus a cost for running the test.
Tests that simply simulate a number of users clicking through a number of url's are pretty easy to set up and usually cost between £100 and £250.
Stress testing of transactions that require programming take longer to set up and therefore have a higher setup cost.
Once a test has been set up it can be saved, so repeating the test takes less time than running it the first time (usually about half the time for simple tests and even less for complex tests).
Next steps...
To request a load test ... click here
To get a quote ... click here
To ask some questions ... click here to send an enquiry, or you can use our live help portal at the top right of this page. Alternately you could email us at customercare@periscopeit.co.uk or call us on 0845 644 9356
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Different kinds of load tests
- Load Tests—this tests your website at the normal (expected) load. For load testing you simply enter the URLs, the number of users, and the time between clicks of your website traffic. This is a “real world” test.
- Stress Tests—these are simulations of “brute force” attacks that apply excessive load to your web server. This type of “brute force” situation can be caused by a massive spike in user activity (i.e., a new advertising campaign). This is a great test to find the traffic threshold for your web server.
- Performance Tests—this test queries single URLs of a web server or web application to identify and discover elements that may be responsible for slower than expected performance. This test provides a unique opportunity to optimize server settings or application configurations by testing various implementations of single web pages/script to identify the fastest code or settings.
- Ramp Tests—this test uses escalating numbers of users over a given time frame to determine the maximum number of users the web server can accommodate before producing error messages.
Different kinds of user behaviour that we can simulate
- Users always click the same URL: In the beginning of the test, each user selects a URL and clicks only this URL during the test. To spread the load evenly on all URLs, set the number of users to the number of URLs or a multiple of that. This setting is very useful in comparing the request times of different webpages (e.g. with different implementations of a feature) or to find out what pages are slower than others. (This is the one I intend to start with)
- Users select URL for each click randomly: Using the built in random function, Webserver Stress Tool simply selects one of the URLs for each click. Depending upon your website, this can be a good setting to create “real world” loads.
- Users follow complete sequence: All users will use URL#1 for the first click, URL#2 for the second click and so on. If a user reaches the last URL he will start with URL#1 again. Use this setting to simulate paths through your website, e.g. to put products into and order from a shopping cart.
- Users visit first X URLs, then random, then last X URLs: All users will use the first X URLs (top to bottom). After that, the remaining URLs are assigned randomly. For CLICKS tests you have the additional option to set a number of URLs at the bottom of the URL list the users should visit at the end of the test. This would be an appropriate test pattern if you have a website in which users have to login using a couple of URLs, then surf around and log out at the end.
Our recommended procedure
We usually find it best to start with a few simple tests that will put a reasonable amount of stress on the web server and database server. We usually recommend starting with a low pressure stress test and rapidly accelerating it to a level where your site shows signs of stress.
The way this works is that we first create a sequence of page url's. We then specify a number of users to simulate and a number of seconds between each users start time. Finally we specify the delay between steps in the sequence for each user. For example:
50 url's
50 users
10 second delay between each step a user takes
Of course every client is unique and if you require a different approach we will work with you to make sure that we give you what you need. |
