General

Stop feeding fat cats
General

Stop feeding fat cats

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I believe that when you see something completely wrong and cannot correct it, you should at least share your view with other people. This is the only way to change anything in this world.

This article is about load testing, but if you read it to the end, you will see that it is about the whole IT industry, about the whole economic reality and about our life. I will use an example which I know very well to demonstrate something very common, yet not very well understood.

A short technical introduction. Imagine that you are about to release a new web site. Will it work well when accessed by multiple concurrent users? This question can be answered if you perform a load testing. Obviously, this task cannot be accomplished manually by your staff members or beta testers [..]

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WAPT Pro 3.0 released!
General WAPT usage

WAPT Pro 3.0 released!

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I wish I could make this post half a year ago. This is a really long awaited release, but it has finally happened. So, let’s see what’s new. Here is the list of added features. Sorry for so short descriptions. I will probably add more comments on some of these features in the next post.

Highly configurable test load

You can specify all load parameters separately for each virtual user profile. For example, you can join constant, growing and periodic load in the same test. You can also choose a specific load agent for each profile, if you do not want to use the automatic allocation [..]

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Choosing the best software for your business
General

Choosing the best software for your business

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When you spend $1 for a new mobile game, you don’t care about the price and you want the game right now. There is no need to check competitive products, so, the immediate decision looks reasonable. The situation is different when you choose a software product for your business. In this case you cannot rely on your first impression. You probably have certain expectations regarding the product and you want to make sure that these expectations are met.

The tool you choose should be reliable. You should be confident that it will never stop working suddenly on a changed data input or in other new conditions.

Should meet your business goals now and (at least) in the near future. Note that it is not always possible to fully estimate this in a reasonable time using a demo version or a manual. […]

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Efficiency and capacity of load testing tools
General

Efficiency and capacity of load testing tools

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If you are looking for a load testing solution to check the performance of your web site, or to start using permanently in your web development process, you may need to analyze various characteristics of many tools before you make your choice. One of such characteristics is the efficiency.

If you want to test a web application used internally by your company staff, you may need to check that it supports, say, 100 concurrent user sessions.

This is not a very big load for any tool. You will hardly need more than one generating system to run such test.

The situation is completely different, if you need to stress test a popular internet portal. A load of 100,000 concurrent users can be a good check for it. […]

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Ten names for load testing
General

Ten names for load testing

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Load testing is a wide and established area of IT knowledge and software development practices. There are many professionals who specialize here and testing gurus ready to provide useful advices and even teach you a theory on the subject. Surprisingly, the mentioned gurus often do not agree with each other on the very basic terms used in this field.

If you search for information on load testing, most probably you will also find articles mentioning such terms as “performance testing” and “stress testing”.

Are they all just synonyms? Everybody agrees that they are not, but still different sources provide different definitions for these terms.

The most confusing point is the difference between performance and load testing. Some people reasonably say that […]

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Hidden controls in HTML forms
General

Hidden controls in HTML forms

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I would like to continue writing about the methods used to pass various data between the client and server part of a web application. In the previous post I briefly described the cookies mechanism used to join the successive requests of the same user into a consistent session. The basic […]

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Cookies and user sessions
General

Cookies and user sessions

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We all know that a web site can have a complex distributed structure with load balancers and database servers. However from the outside view any web site is just a computer program that is always waiting from an HTTP connection. When something (usually a browser) connects to it and sends […]

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What is an HTTP request?
General

What is an HTTP request?

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I will not write about HTTP protocol in general. I want to concentrate on few facts about HTTP requests that are important for load testing. As I mentioned in the previous post, when we work with a web site using a browser, all our actions produce HTTP requests that a […]

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