A recent study of our clients has revealed an interesting phenomenon: the number of universities, school districts, training centers and all other types of commercial and non-profit educational organizations is disproportionally high among the users of our load testing tools.
We released the latest versions of our load testing tools few months ago. All users who have had an opportunity to update their product installations already know that two major features in that release were the support of HTTP/2 protocol and the ability to execute concurrent requests in each user session. In fact, each of those features is a complement to the other one, because the development of HTTP/2 was inspired by the idea of concurrency in the first place.
Yet, it is true that not every web application has switched to the new version of the protocol by now. So, what if your test project does not require any of these major features? Will you get any benefits after upgrading to WAPT Pro 5.0 from the previous version of the tool?
We have been working on this for quite some time. Now a new version of WAPT Pro is about to appear, and this time we decided to start with releasing it in beta. Even though the tool GUI looks almost unchanged, all parts that actually do the work (test recorder and load generation unit) have been completely rewritten. This was not done just to squeeze out a few percent of performance or because the old code was bad. It was very good for executing user sessions consisting of successive HTTP requests. This concept is still applied by the majority of the load testing tools, but we wanted to become the true concurrency pioneers.
Web applications are becoming more and more interactive. They do not resemble static web pages anymore. That is why they require functionality like instant messaging, user status updates, real time data view, peer to peer interaction, etc. Until recently, the most common way of such communication was polling via HTTP […]
When I speak to our CEO, who is in charge of our marketing processes, he keeps telling me that there are too many vendors like us in the IT world and we desperately need to differentiate somehow to be spotted by anyone out there.
The “try before you buy” concept does not work anymore. Trying something is an exhaustive task. People cannot oblige themselves to toil that much. Worst of all, even after you’ve tried a lot, you may still be uncertain if that was a good experience or not.
After several years of work with our customers I decided to summarize my experience by gathering the most common user confusions resulted in questions to our technical support service. I think that most of these issues were caused by wrong ideas or interpretations people may have had. In other words, in each specific case the problem was caused not by the lack of information, but rather by some sort of incorrect assumptions.
Of course, nothing like that would be possible if everyone spent couple hours reading the user guide before trying to use the product. But for some reason people rarely do it this way.
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of the common interfaces used to retrieve information from a Windows system. Such information can include values provided not only by the system itself, but by various software programs running on it. That is why WMI is widely used to monitor the performance and correct operation of the server components.
Many load testing tools, such as WAPT Pro, can monitor performance counters directly from the tested servers with help of WMI. The most useful counters are those representing CPU, RAM and network usage, but there can be other server-specific ones that you can easily retrieve.
In the last days of 2013 we released a cloud version of our load testing solution. It is based on WAPT Pro, all extension modules and x64 Load Engines, so it is the most feature-reach and powerful combination of all the components we have.
This on-demand load testing solution is offered through the Amazon EC2 Marketplace. This means that with few clicks you can get the full functionality of WAPT Pro running on a virtual system instance in the Amazon Cloud. To do this you need to have an AWS account, however it is also very easy to create one. We provide step by step usage instructions right from our web site.
Some experienced users already know that all our products can be used in any cloud or virtual environment. So, technically this release is not a big step forward. With new cloud version it is easier to start and configure the product, but this is not the actual benefit. What really makes the change is the pricing for the new solution, which is now based on the hour rates.
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a network protocol that allows one device to query another device for information, change information on a device, or for one device to send a message to another device. It is widely used to monitor hardware and software components of web sites during normal operations or during testing. That is why advanced load testing tools, such as WAPT Pro, usually have ability to connect to any servers and receive performance counters data (such as CPU or RAM usage values).
Older versions of Windows, like XP, had SNMP service installed by default, so you only had to start it or enable automatic start. After that you could connect to that system with any SNMP client and monitor anything you needed.
Recently we have discovered that our load testing solution can be applied in a quite unusual way. One of our users has shared his “success story” with us. It perfectly shows how widely you can apply the product if you know its features very well and have a good fantasy.
The story is actually about Cyber Monday online shopping. You know, some web sites run very special actions to attract customers. They sell limited number of items at exceptionally low prices. In theory you can make a very good deal if you participate. In practice this is almost impossible, because each new item is ordered by someone immediately after it becomes available. Here is where WAPT Pro appeared to be a great automation solution.
