• Speeding Up a Slow Website

    A web site that is running slower than it should be needs immediate attention. A computer and a web site runs at a

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  • Load Testing Your Website

    If you own a website or blog, you probably try to bring in as many visitors as you possibly can because this is

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  • Stress Testing: The Fundamentals

    Software Stress Testing Basics After all functional testing and verification are complete, no software is complete until it verifies to be durable enough

    learn more

Speeding Up a Slow Website

A web site that is running slower than it should be needs immediate attention. A computer and a web site runs at a certain speed which is normally consistant.

However, once a web site begins to run in a sluggish manner you know some kind of problem does exist. Something that can help you pinpoint a problem with a particular web site is load testing. Load testing is frequently used to measure a software response. Therefore, slower than average response time can be an accurate indicator that something needs to be corrected within a software system.

Load testing is specifically designed to determine a systems overall behavior under normal and peak conditions. Therefore, load testing can accurately measure response time especially when a web site is experiencing unusually high traffic from visitors and or other web sites.

Spike testing can also help to diagnose any problems with the overall function of a particular web site. Spike testing can be used to determine the overall stability of a particular type of computer or systems software. This kind of testing can easily target any fluctuation in computer activity and function during peak times and times when traffic is exceptionally low.

Testing firewalls can be included when conducting Spike testing. In some cases, a firewall can slow a system down which ultimately affects log on, log off time, changing computer screens and browsing. Firewalls are supposed to add protection to a computer system. However, sometimes a firewall malfunction can block critical information from entering or being added to a web site. When this occurs, it may be necessary to remove the firewall and reinstall the firewall at a later time. Even when you’re not using a firewall, servers can still be slow, and it can be hard to determine who is the fastest, most reliable web host.

Aside from common testing procedures, there are programs that can be purchased and downloaded that will speed up the accuracy of your computer and web site function. Some of these programs work similar to a defragment system. A defragment should be done periodically on a computer system to keep it running in a timely and efficient manner in order to clear up the cache and other cluttered files.

Load Testing Your Website

If you own a website or blog, you probably try to bring in as many visitors as you possibly can because this is the way that you are able to increase your revenue and actually make money. What you might not realize is that your website or blog has a certain amount of load that it is able to accumulate when people are visiting it on a daily basis. If there are too many people trying to visit your website at the same time, this could cause your entire website to crash and it can deter you from getting the revenue that you have always wanted. This, and other load testing information can help you

This is why load testing is incredibly important for website owners all over the world. Load testing, which is also known as stress testing or concurrent user testing, is something that you should have done in order to see how many people can visit your website at once without it crashing. This type of testing will allow you to feel totally confident in the fact that you can have a variety of people visiting your website as often as possible without the worry that everything is going to crash all at once (trust me, this is good load testing information).

The way this type of testing can work for you is by simulating the amount of people on your website who might be visiting it on any given basis. The load testing will then measure how many hits your website can get before it crashes and this will give you an idea as to how your server is reacting. You may not even realize how often your website crashes if you are not actually visiting it as often as your clients themselves. This is why it is incredibly important that you benefit from load testing and see how it can help you as it has for a lot of other individuals who own websites and blogs very much like your own. Stress testing can also be incredibly affordable and can easily fit into your budget because it does not take a lot of time or resources in order to get it done by a professional team of experts who do this for a living.

Load Testing Tools: Open Source, JMeter, and More

If you’re considering load testing your site, you may have seen that there are a variety of tools available from different companies as well as open-source tools from various software organizations like Apache’s JMeter tool.

Which might leave you wondering, which tool is best for you? The answer to this question really depends on whether or not you’re going to pay for load testing, and whether or not you have needs that are greater than what the open source tools can fulfill. If you find yourself needing something a bit more powerful than JMeter, take a look at Web Hosting Buddy’s JMeter alternatives list, which has a variety of load testing options.

At the end of the day, your load testing needs will really dictate what it is that you need to use in terms of a load testing tool. Smaller and lesser requirements can be met typically with open-source tools, where larger more complex requirements may require enterprise-level tools.

References:

loadview-testing.com/load-testing
webhostingbuddy.com/alternatives/jmeter
jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/get-started.html

Stress Testing: The Fundamentals

Software Stress Testing Basics
After all functional testing and verification are complete, no software is complete until it verifies to be durable enough in real world environments through thorough stress testing. Of course, those development shops that use a full agile process often incorporate regular stress testing from the first few builds. This takes any surprise in the delivery phase out of the picture. Doing effective Stress Testing involves sometimes crazy loads that may sometimes break the computer Operating Systems as well as finding the exact loading conditions that break your software.

Once the limits are found through Stress Testing, any deficiency that is deemed too possible or too catastrophic must be corrected in the source code. The failures may be found to localize mostly in the backend modules or they may be exposed in the front-end user interface or through live websites. The failures purposefully created in the process of Stress Testing help you prepare your products and services for the unexpected problems that will crop up in real-world usage. Ideally, daily builds should be overnight stress tested in a scalable test lab.

When the software is in its initial Beta Release phase, all the real-world problems discovered should be added to the stress suite of tests. In this way, any imagined or discovered problem area in your software is verified to always remain fixed, with every build of the software. Often a bug fix will cause a regression in a particular stress test scenario, requiring the software engineer to revise his or her bug fix code.

A secondary set of metrics about your software, that gets exposed in stress testing, is the particular performance speed and throughput possible. Any major bottlenecks in your software’s process can be identified and corrected, when possible. The goal is at least have final release software that fails gracefully and with useful error reporting. A regular and rigorous test regime can make or break any software product or service.

What is Load Testing? How Does it Work?

Make Sure a System Still Works When Load Tested

All software gets tested for correct functionality before it is released to customers. Even when the operations are correct, there is still the matter of how well it performs when it is sharing computing resources with many other programs and the machinations of the Operating System when it is also being stressed. This can be done for normal conditions,

In the modern Agile software development environment, testing is always concurrent to development. Yet, there is still the need to do separate Load Testing, which is also sometimes called Stress Testing. This special type of testing simulates the real world conditions, in servers and across networks, that a large number of end users will present to your software, once it is released.

Load Testing has become its own specialty area in software product development, with many tools now available to customize and automate the process. The basic idea is to run your application, o

called “Load Testing,” or pushed to the breaking limit with stress testing.r suite of apps with various levels of stress conditions placed upon it. Where it breaks is where it needs to be fixed. Whatever is considered “normal” for operating conditions should be applied first. When your software can pass the normal level of stress, it is time to really turn the screws with an excessive overload that sucks up all CPU cycles and uses every possible resource in the entire system.

While such a scenario seems highly unlikely, any seasoned IT veteran can tell you the unrealistic stress conditions do sometimes crop up in real life. It is crucial that you know when and where your software will break during such conditions. Of course, the overall plan is to make a new piece of software as bullet-proof as possible. So, when stress testing breaks something, it is important to find solutions.

Stress Testing is actually a bit distinct from Load Testing, as it represents the unreasonable, most-unlikely scenarios. Whether backend systems or websites, deliberate failures produced by stress testing is extremely important for producing final refinements that make the software enterprise ready. The secondary payoff is that you determine the actual performance capacity limits of your software.