So you’ve run your first free load test with LoadFocus. What’s next?
Load Testing Goal
The main goal of load testing is to see whether the application can sustain the increased load on the server or will it crash the server. Your application can be a website, some API or web services you use or expose to customers, a wordpress blog or any other public URL that you expose. Also, to identify areas in the architecture of your application which don’t function properly, either too slow or not functioning at all.
Load Testing would provide data for rendering or doing different actions on the website with a number of concurrent users and still have a good performance.
Prerequisites
There are a few prerequisites that you need to gather in order to run a successful load test assessment.
Enter you Analytics tool and gather the top 3 locations from where your customers access your website or web services.
Check all the Load Test Locations supported.
Also, find out how many users accessed your application per second.
Define supported concurrent users/second, expected response time and any other client side (latency, hits/second) or server side (CPU, Memory etc) performance metrics you want to consider.
Make sure the load tested URL is up and publicly available before running any load or performance tests
Check the HTTP method for your tests (GET is the request done by browsers when accessing a website or an API endpoint) and protocol (HTTP vs. HTTPS).
Have in mind that this number may change in the future, when you send a big email campaign or post a new viral article on your blog. So you need to be prepared to handle this new load in order not to lose potential customer or get SEO downgraded, because of your slow website (system under test).
You need to determine what good performance means for your System under Test, because the system under test will start throwing errors and maybe start crashing under a heavy load of actions/concurrent users
Load Test Scenarios
And create the proper load testing scenarios to simulate hits from your customers’ locations.
- Start with a small number of clients (1, 20, 50, 100 concurrent users / second). Try to increase the number of the clients gradually to understand how your API, Website or WebApp behaves.
- Run GET requests on your main website pages (top 5 web pages)
- Identify and run API Login request (usually these are POST requests made with a POST Body to an API endpoint)
- Make GET or POST requests with an authenticated or non-authenticated user
- Monitor for each test:
- Client side: Response time, Latency time, Hits/s, Throughput/s
- Server side: CPU, Memory, I/O
- Errors: 4xx, 5xx, Other error codes and responses
Next Steps
Load testing is an iterative process. Once you find one issue, you need to re-run the load test and find the next!
Run your free load test today!
LoadFocus is cloud Performance, load and stress testing tool which provides the infrastructure and the ability to run all these tests in less than a few minutes, keep history of the results, compare different runs to inspect performance improvements or performance degradation.
More resources can be found here:
Top 15 reasons why load testing is important to your website
Load Testing for RESTful APIs in the Cloud