Get your Websites or APIs tested by LoadFocus

Load Testing Page Load Time Performance Testing Test Automation UI Testing

< 1 minute read

Your website or API is going to be tested by our testing team.

LoadFocus.com released a new pricing plan – the Business Plan. The big plus with this new plan is that we are going to provide every month a performance and a speed assessment of your web application or API.
We are going to provide a load testing assessment:

  • potential performance bottlenecks
  • errors and issues when a large number of users access your website
  • boundary testing to understand which are the limits of your system, or how many users/clients can access you website in parallel
  • full performance metrics: response time, latency, hits per second, throughput per second, percentiles, standard devition
  • charts showing how the applications behaves over a bigger period

We are going to provide a website speed testing assessment:

  • response time and performance score
  • potential errors and W3C validation issues
  • hand-on advice on how to improve the speed on your website: caching, minifying, compressing assets, resizing images

Overall, even if you have a website, a WordPress blog or you just want to check how your APIs behave, we’re going to provide valuable feedback regarding potential issues, things on how to improve them, hand-on advice on best practices at the moment on the web (client/server side). This will help you understand better how your application works, and how your users experience it.

Click here and checkout the Business Plan created specially for you, after you’ll try it one, you’ll never want to cancel. Check it now.

 

LoadFocus.com is a Cloud Testing Platform used for Load and Performance Testing for Websites and APIs and Website Speed Testing with Analytics.

Why Minify JavaScript?

Load Testing Performance Testing

< 1 minute read

In this post we are going to present why minifying javascript files is important.
People believe that compressing (gzipping) JavaScript files should be enough and there is no need to minify JavaScript files.
This is a common mistake and below we present an explanation of what is involved in the process of minifying a file and why we should still do it even though we gzip our files.

What are the processes that happen when you minify a file ?

  • code comments are removed
  • line breaks are removed
  • unnecessary spaces are removed
  • extraneous punctuation (such as parentheses and semicolons) and other whitespace are removed
  • some javascript minifiers do more advanced operations like shortening of variables, properties, arguments, classes, functions and method names (sometimes people call this to be obfuscation but is just a bi-product of minification)
  • some javascript minifiers wrap the code in a immediately executed function, with a lot of arguments like below that makes it possible to use these variables without declaring them with the var keyword, thus reducing the size of you code in some cases with tree bytes times the number var keywords

(function(a,b,c,d,e,f,g){/* ... */})();

In case the files just get gzipped all these extra bytes will be compressed. So by minifying our files we can save quite a few bytes on a big file. We minifying our files we reduce also the response time when that resource is requested by our application.

LoadFocus.com is a Cloud Testing Platform used for Load and Performance Testing for Websites and APIs and Website Speed Testing with Analytics.

Standard Deviation and Percentiles in Load Testing Metrics

Load Testing Performance Testing

< 1 minute read

Standard deviation and percentiles are very helpful when comes to calculating the response times in a load test or a performance test.

Standard deviation is just like it sounds: the routine deviation around the average. Standard Deviation can then be used as a gauge of longer response times.

For normal distributions, we know that roughly 70% of the response times will be within one standard deviation of the average; and that about 95% of the responses will be within two standard deviations.

The standard deviation should be a low number, if your load test is consistent in load you want to see this number low because it means most response times are close in number.

If the Standard Deviation number is too low/high you can use it to identify a potential bottleneck in your web application or website.
The mean is the average, which can be pulled higher or lower by a cluster of extremely fast or slow responses being collected

The Median or the 50th Percentile is great but only accounts for what 50% of your users will experience. Would be better to check the 90th(95th) percentiles values, rather than mean, to ensure only those 10% wildcard calls are ‘missed’.
Typically, we’re only interested in the poor performers, so we pick a few top percentiles, like the 85th, 90th, 95th, and 99th.

Load testing is an iterative process. Once you find one issue, you need to re-run the load test and find the next! Here are some load testing tips on how to run your load test.

LoadFocus.com has standard deviation, mean, median (50th percentile), 90th(99th) percentiles and minimum and maximum metrics to all load tests.

Website speed test comparison between the landing pages of the most important car producers in UK

Page Load Time Performance Testing Website Speed Testing

3 minutes read

Today we are going to website speed test the landing pages of the most important car producers and sellers in the UK.

 

First tested site: UK website of Audi manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.33.16

Next tested site: UK website of Vauxhall manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.33.44

 

Next tested site: UK website of Ford manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.34.08

 

Next tested site: UK website of Land Rover manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.34.44

 

Next tested site: UK website of Mini manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.35.07

 

Next tested site: UK website of Mercedes manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.35.25

 

Next tested site: UK website of Toyota manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.36.04

 

Last tested site: UK website of Honda manufacturer

Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 00.36.28

 

In terms of page load time the order would be:

  1. Mercedes site – 865 ms
  2. Honda site – 2055 ms
  3. Vauxhall site – 2183 ms
  4. Audi site – 2420 ms
  5. Ford site – 2611 ms
  6. Mini site – 2649 ms
  7. Toyota site – 2821 ms
  8. Land Rover – 3959 ms

In terms of the performance score (the score given based on compression of different types of resources, caching …) the order would be:

  1. Vauxhall site – 68/100
  2. Honda site – 58/100
  3. Audi site – 55/100
  4. Ford site – 55/100
  5. Mini site – 52/100
  6. Land Rover – 41/100
  7. Toyota site – 31/100
  8. Mercedes site – 24/100

 

Seems that almost all of the sites have a lot ore to improve to achieve the score closer to 100. For this the section with the Advice from the LoadFocus platform gives a lot of hints on how to improve this. Improving the performance score will also improve the page load time of the pages measured.

The tests were run using the Website Speed Test functionality of the LoadFocus platform:

https://loadfocus.com/website-speed-testing

 

Enjoy. Make your sites perform better for your customers satisfaction.

 

 

How to load test or website speed test an application on localhost using LoadFocus

Load Testing Page Load Time Website Speed Testing

2 minutes read

When do you need to load test or measure the loading time of your application on localhost:

  • before you deploy your application the first time and assign a public IP
  • during development of a new feature that you want to test in terms of performance metrics

Below are the steps that will help test your application on localhost:

  • Go to https://ngrok.com/
  • Create an account
  • Download the ngrok software on your localhost
  • Install the auth token that you have been assigned when you created the account on https://ngrok.com
    Ex. ./ngrok authtoken 2CN4XNu97Hk2KCbuKF9pp_2NqX7j8kBntMBSEuG9mwv – change the last part with your auth token
  • Start ngrok on your localhost like:
    Ex. ./ngrok http 80 – this will forward the requests to port 80 on your localhost (in case you need another port just change 80 to the desired port)
  • Once started in the command line you will see the url that you need to use in your load test (should be something like the following: http://b1455fgd.ngronk.io)
  • Log into your LoadFocus account and create your first test
  • Set Test name, the location from which you want to run the test and the url which in this case will be something like: http://adafce35.ngrok.io
Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 20.15.14

That’s all. Enjoy.

P.S.: Ngrok software will have an impact on the results of the test but is a good starting point until you will deploy your application on the production environment.

 

LoadFocus.com is a Cloud Testing Platform used for Load and Performance Testing for Websites and APIs and Website Speed Testing with Analytics.

Load Testing Jenkins Plugin from LoadFocus.com

Integrations Load Testing Performance Testing Test Automation

< 1 minute read

We’ve released our load testing plugin for Jenkins CI.

Use the Post build actions and define your load test limits in order to mark the build UNSTABlE or FAILED

Easy multiple accounts access via the credential Jenkins plugin.

More details here: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/LoadFocus+Load+Testing+Plugin

Installation Steps:
1. Create your load testing account on https://loadfocus.com
2. Copy your LoadFocus.com API key from https://loadfocus.com/account
3. Go to Jenkins Dashboard and click go to Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins > Available
4. Locate and install LoadFocus Load Test plugin
5. Go to Manage Jenkins > Manage Credentials and add your LoadFocus.com API key to the stored credentials

Schedule your tests inside Jenkins to monitor failures and application bottlenecks.

 

Results are present in the job’s result for each run:
LoadFocus-configure-post-build-step

LoadFocus-list-results LoadFocus-result-details

Happy Load Testing!

How to use Header Presets to Reuse Set of Headers for Future Load Tests

Load Testing Performance Testing RESTful APIs UI Testing

2 minutes read

We’ve implemented the Header Presets functionality in order to save time and reused same set of headers for future load tests.

The steps on how to use the Header Presets are described below:

  • Under the URL section click on the Headers button
    url_header_presets_1
  • Click “Manage Presets” button and Popup appears with the list of current presets (empty at the beginning)
    url_header_presets_2
  • Click “Add” button to add new presets
  •  New Presets popup appears
    • Select a name for the current set of headers presets
    • Start adding key/value pairs for the current preset
    • Click “Submit” when finished adding all the key/value pairs

    url_header_presets_3

  • The new preset will be visible in the Manage Presets popup
    url_header_presets_4
  • If you want to edit the current preset, just click on the preset name and edit the preset (names and values)
  • Close the “Manage Presets” popup and the presets dropdown will be populated with all created presets
    url_header_presets_5
  • Now just select the desired preset and the Headers will get populated with the values from the preset
    url_header_presets_6
  • You can click on any preset in the dropdown, the values will append to the existing ones

Use the headers for load testing websites or APIs with custom headers.

Hope this helps is making LoadFocus a better and easier load testing service and your choice for the load testing tool to use.

 

LoadFocus.com is a Cloud Testing Platform used for Load and Performance Testing for Websites and APIs and Website Speed Testing with Analytics.