Demanding customer expectations and the rapid distribution of information across social media have made website and applications crashes an off-limits path for today’s companies and organizations.
Crashes resulting from traffic spikes cause immediate and long-term loss of sales, as well as tarnishing the brand name. When servers or websites go down during highly anticipated events such as Black Friday, the Big Game or before a major concert, the repercussions can be permanent.
Yet, avoiding the “website temporarily unavailable” screen is also easier than ever before. By performance testing your website continuously and proactively you can easily detect errors, bottlenecks and bugs, and then fix them to ensure your website handles any amount of traffic.
Here are five best practices for load testing your website or app:
Define Your Load Goals
Before starting your tests, you need to figure out what it is that you need to test.
This includes the number of concurrent users, traffic patterns and areas that users can visit on your site. For example, if your site has 10,000 users concurrent at its peak, but 3,000 arrive in the morning and that total slowly climbs up to 10,000 in the afternoon—and these visitors mostly just browse your homepage—you’ll need to run a different test than if you have 10,000 concurrent users on your website all day long, constantly browsing multiple pages.
To determine your load goals, you need to engage directly with your business colleagues. For instance, get your product manager to set the system’s expected abilities, ask the marketing team to inform you about any special campaigns that might increase website traffic, and then look at server logs and tools such as Google Analytics to determine previous customer patterns.
Choose Your Load Testing Tools
There are multiple open-source load-testing tools that you can use to run your tests.
JMeter is the most popular tool, but you can also use Gatling, Locust, Tsung, The Grinder or Selenium. See here to learn more about the differences between these toolsets.
Does this seem complicated? Taurus is an open-source automation test framework that simplifies running these tools, by using a simple YAML script. If you need to run your tests from the cloud, utilizing rich analytics or requiring user collaboration, you might consider using BlazeMeter.
Take Your System to the Limit
To make sure you stand up to your load goals, you need a buffer; specifically, you need to make sure that your system can handle heavier loads.
This ensures that the CPU stays low and you don’t experience memory leaks. However, we also recommend you take your system to the limit and see when and how it fails. This ensures that you know exactly what your system’s weaknesses are, giving you a better ability to fix any errors that might occur.
This is especially important if you come across an unexpected traffic spike—say, if your competitor’s website crashes and all their customers come running to you. Wouldn’t you rather be prepared for that?
Monitor Test Results
Set aside resources for looking at test results.
Examine KPIs including Response Time and Hits/s, as well as the correlations between them, to learn what your system’s abilities and bottlenecks are. This information will help you see what needs fixing.
As you continue testing over time, you will be able to identify KPI trends, which will help you monitor system health. We also recommend you monitor backend KPIs like DB Queries, with APM tools.
Test Again
So, you’ve tested, you’ve analyzed, and you’ve fixed.
Now you have one last thing to do: Run your tests again to make sure everything is working smoothly after the committed changes. That ensures nothing gets overlooked. It would be a shame if all your hard work went down the drain due to a minor oversight.
Now, let’s get testing!
To get more load testing tips, check out this free whitepaper, “How to Ensure Your Website or App Won’t Fail at Peak Times.” To learn more about BlazeMeter, request a demo.