LoadView – Concurrent User Testing
Test website, application, and API performance under the load of an increasing number of concurrent users. Record actionable data and optimize your systems to scale with your traffic.
Concurrent User Testing from the Cloud
Concurrent user load testing sends traffic to a web application, web page, or API (Application Programming Interface) to stress the infrastructure. Specific metrics are observed and recorded during the test, and system response times during periods of sustained heavy load are measured. With LoadView, you can increase the number of concurrent users slowly or quickly throughout your test to record how performance is affected under sustained load.
The idea behind concurrent user testing is to identify the response time of a website for a specified number of concurrent users making requests to a website. Concurrent user testing measures how long it takes the server to respond to a specified number of concurrent requests. A concurrent user test is often used to identify bottlenecks in the performance of a website – basically to find out how many concurrent users can make requests of a website until the performance of the site is significantly degraded.
LoadView simulates visitor activity with real browsers controlled by virtual users to replicate various levels of demand on a website or web-based service.
Simultaneous User Testing
Send 10 to 10,000+ simultaneous users to your web application to test the performance of your production hardware, software, and infrastructure. You know there are limits to how much traffic your website can handle, but do you know what those limits are? There are several layers supporting your website that could be a potential bottleneck including web servers, file servers, routers, firewalls, and more. Once you have identified the breaking point, you can then strengthen the weak spots in your system.
Simultaneous user testing is sometimes mistakenly referred to concurrent user testing, however, there is a difference, even if the words themselves indicate that something is happening or occurring at the same time. While concurrent users refer to the number of users using or landing on your website or application at any given time, simultaneous users are users, or visitors, that are carrying out a specific transaction, at the same time, during a specific point in time.
For example, you may have 100 different visitors on a specific page, how does performance compare when 40 users log into your portal at the same time? Or if you operate a hotel, for example, what happens when 100 people try to make a reservation at the same time? These are important factors to understand, as it directly affects the user experience.
Use Case Scenario – Concurrent Load Testing
With LoadView, there are a variety of ways you can conduct a concurrent user test. For example, you can begin load testing with as few as 10 concurrent users and run these users for five minutes to establish your baseline performance metrics. After establishing a baseline, you can increase the number of concurrent users by 10 users a minute until you reach 100 concurrent users. You may choose to follow that up with a test run for another five minutes for every 100 additional concurrent users to be sure that the results level out.
Some factors that may cause spikes or drops in web page response time while adding concurrent users include additional allocation of memory on the webs server or additional concurrent database connections on the backend. These could easily cause a spike in the average page load speed while waiting for the system resources to become free only to drop back to normal levels once the resources have been allocated.
To test this, you may choose to run a test of 1,000 to 10,000 concurrent users, or until you feel you have adequately proven that your website is capable of handling peak user numbers. These tests can be used to identify both the volume of users that cause unacceptable page load speeds as well as the number of concurrent page requests that causes the web app to crash. This may be done by running additional load tests that start at a higher volume of users in order to push the system to its limits.
Concurrent Load Testing from Global Cloud Services
Do not overload your own network and hardware.
Utilize the globally distributed cloud injectors to generate the traffic you need.
External Concurrent User Testing (From Outside Your Network)
Many website load testing platforms will drive traffic to your site from within your network, but that does not accurately portray real customer traffic coming across the internet. A true load test allows you to consider additional variables such as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), load balancers, multi-node server farms and other traffic optimization tools.
LoadView lets you select where your traffic originates from using top tier cloud providers and includes over 40 Azure Cloud Services and Amazon Web Services (AWS) locations to choose from. This allows you to test the same regions where the majority of your traffic comes into your site or application. Taking in another step further, you can allocate different percentages of traffic to originate from each geographic location as you see fit, if necessary. This allows you to ensure that your website page or application load speed is consistently fast even under the demand of a high number of concurrent users.
Going Viral with Thousands of Concurrent Visitors
When your website sees a spike in traffic or an ad campaign goes viral, do you know if your site will be able to handle the increase in concurrent users? LoadView provides you with the tools to setup a cloud-based load test that increases concurrent users until you have identified the number of concurrent users your website can handle before you start seeing performance issues. Knowing the capacity of concurrent users on your existing infrastructure is critical to supporting traffic growth and preparing for spike in traffic (and the same thing applies when testing an API that could become popular with developers).
Simple, Powerful Concurrent User Testing
Simply build your load testing plan and script, designate a load curve, and run your test!
LoadView: Take the Hassle out of Performance Testing
Need to test website performance when ten thousand concurrent users hit your website at the same time? Or do you need to create a complex multi-step script or transaction that you want to test under load? Need to generate millions of hits on your website per test? Worried about managing hundreds or thousands of load injectors in the cloud? If any of these questions sound like
With LoadView, you do not have to create your own load injectors or virtual machine images and upload gigabytes of files to the cloud. Once you have your load test plan ready, simply select from multiple load curves – Load Step, Goal-based, and Dynamic Adjustable – and choose the number of concurrent users you want to visit the site each minute and you are ready to run your test.
How to Properly Perform Concurrent Load Testing
To properly load test concurrent users, you need a robust tool than can spin up hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users to generate load on your web app. Then the system needs to ramp up the number of simultaneous users until you have proven your site can handle the load or you have identified bottlenecks in your application. Traditional load testing tools and open-source load testing tools cannot support large-scale tests. A peak load test using thousands of concurrent users from a cloud-based system like LoadView can easily scale up to meet the needs of your tests.
Proactively Identify Concurrent User Bottlenecks
When a website is first developed, it is typically not designed to maximize the number of users able to visit the site at the same time. Far too often a concurrent user bottleneck is not identified until it is too late, and you are losing site visitors due to a slowdown in site responsiveness or a full-blown website crash.
LoadView can initiate a test at a known safe level of traffic and then add additional users every minute so you can see how the website load times are affected as more simultaneous users visit the site. Once you have identified the number of concurrent visitors that pushes response times past your comfort level, you can then begin diagnosing the cause of the slowdown.
Answers to your Peak Performance Questions
Are you looking to identify how many concurrent connections a website can handle before it is significantly slowed down? LoadView will help you identify the answers to your peak performance questions by tracking average page load times under increasing levels of user traffic.
At what point does the Reddit “Hug of Death” or the “Slashdot Effect” take down your website? Find out by performing concurrent user testing with LoadView.
Concurrent Virtual User Load Testing and
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
RUM can be a great tool for tracking your website performance in real time from a user’s perspective, however, getting enough real users to understand performance can prove difficult. Synthetic, real brower load testing goes a step beyond RUM where you generate traffic from simultaneous virtual users in order to stress test a system.
LoadView gathers the metrics from every single individual virtual user session so you can see average page performance at a high level, and then drill down into the details of the performance of each element on the page at any given point in time. RUM provides such insights using code built into the website (usually JavaScript) while LoadView records the website performance from the browser level.
Know how many visitors your site can handle. Always be prepared with LoadView.