Happy Winter everyone,
Has anyone used any of the "cloud" based services to do load testing on your web site? We just launched a new site and I'm looking at a couple of them (http://loadstorm.com/load-testing-company , http://browsermob.com/load-testing). Do you have any recommendations? We had a consultant do our first load testing on our old site but it is very expensive so I'm looking at a less expensive route.
Thanks,
Gloria
Gloria,
You may want to check into http://www.webperformanceinc.com/sales/load-tester.html - In the past we've used the client application, but it looks like they now offer a solution in the Cloud based on Amazon EC2 that's very scalable - they have several options available. They are also not cheap, but it looks like they have several different plans. So depending on your budget, you may want to check. We were satisfied with the ease of setup and some of the different scenario's you can create. It was beneficial to watch the flow of each page and get statistics on which pages would load slower and then you can figure how to optimize the page or the code you're using. We were also able to monitor the actual performance of the web server with the tool under different loads.
It's a good way to get a baseline on your hardware setup, and the stress you can handle. You'll also want to keep an eye on the bandwidth too since that often has an impact on your websites performance under heavy loads.
You should also check out the web harness available from the Tessitura Network, this is a good tool to test out the performance of your api, database, seat server components, etc. It's very easy to use and will help test out the internal components, use them in conjunction with your other tests and you should be able to identify any bottlenecks.
-dan
Thanks Dan. Is the web harness on Footprints?
Yes it's supposed to be out there on TASK.
The network has more information on the harness here.
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/network/Products/Network%20Products%20Services/Web%20API%20Test%20Harness%20Application.aspx