Scalability Testing and Performance Tools

Scalability and Performance Testing from the Cloud

In order to ramp up tests on a scalable web application, you need the power and flexibility of a cloud-based load testing platform that LoadView provides. The EveryStep Web Recorder is used to create scripts for those user scenarios and paths that are critical to your business, and the bottom line, like browsing for products, signing into an account or portal, and the path to purchase. With the EveryStep Web Recorder, you can quickly navigate through your application as any user or visitor would do.

Every step of the transaction is saved and available to view in the recorder window. Once you are satisfied with your script, you can save it. You also have the opportunity to edit the script before using it for your load test. One of the best features of the EveryStep Web Recorder is that supports scripting for over 40 desktop/mobile devices and browsers.

As the target application is flooded with simultaneous users from the testing platform, the scalable application infrastructure adds additional computing power to handle the increased load. As the application scales up, you need a testing platform that will continue to increase the load generated. LoadView does this effortlessly, allowing you to control the load curve as needed.

Managed Scalability Testing

We fully-manage the testing infrastructure—no cloud accounts are required.

It’s hard enough managing a scalable web platform, whether it is automated or manual, but trying to also manage a scalable load testing platform when performing a test can be a huge headache. You don’t want to worry about whether the testing platform has scaled up and shut down nodes gracefully after the test, and you certainly don’t want to be caught off-guard by the cost of orphaned cloud servers that continue to run after a test is over.

LoadView manages all aspects of the cloud for you during a test, from instantiating the servers and loading the test cases, to aggregating the test results and shutting down the servers. There is no need for you to enter any cloud credentials into the system and you will not be charged any hidden or extra fees beyond the cost of the scalability test you set up.

Real Browser Scalability Testing

See how your web application performs in real browsers under heavy simultaneous user load.

One of the unique features of LoadView is the ability to run load tests in real browsers. Many testing suites claim to use real browsers, but they are simply emulating a browser using a headless application such as PhantomJS. While PhantomJS is good at running headless tests, you do not get the true performance of the website rendered in a real browser, including interaction with dynamic and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) such as AJAX, complex JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, or Java applets. While many of these RIAs have slowly become deprecated and replaced in the browser by HTML5 and JavaScript, they are still prevalent on a significant number of websites today.

As more and more interactive content is handled natively by the browsers of the future, these technologies may lose relevancy. However, it will continue to be important to capture content rendered in a real browser to prove that the application is still scalable when many simultaneous users hit your site or application.

Scalability Testing

Mobile Scalability Testing

Now that a large amount of traffic on the Internet is increasingly coming from mobile devices, it’s critical to test the scalability of a website under heavy mobile demand. Since many sites may host different content or even different versions of a web page when viewed on a mobile device, LoadView can help you ensure your site scales not only during desktop browser load testing, but mobile load testing as well.

Why Test Scalability?

Can your application maintain acceptable performance levels under increasing loads of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of simultaneous users? If you are expecting your website or application to handle such numbers, then you need to have a scalable environment set up to increase capacity as website load increases. Scalability testing with LoadView can push those limits, giving insight into how fast your system responds in order to bring the performance results back to acceptable response times.

How to Test the Scalability of an Application

Once your scalable infrastructure is in place, and the components are configured to auto-scale based upon your specified parameters, you may want to perform some baseline performance tests to compare against your scalability test results. One suggested method would be to turn off scalability and run a load test so that you can see how performance degrades as load increases, as well as identify the breaking points where the system fails.

Once your baseline data has been collected, LoadView allows you to turn on the automatic scalability to run the same tests again. You will likely want to add additional upper limit tests because the auto-scaling should continue to perform at levels where the system previously failed. Knowing the limits of your system will allow you to define additional load steps to test each traffic surge.

Using a Cloud Based Scalability Testing Tool – Why It Matters

Don’t worry about managing a costly infrastructure to support high volume load testing. LoadView will spin up as large, or small, of a cloud testing environment you need. LoadView does this on-demand, in a completely managed cloud environment. Don’t worry about environmental costs, such as air conditioning, power consumption, rack space, or server maintenance. With LoadView, you can spin up load injectors to run your tests and they automatically disappear when the test is completed.

If you need to test a scalable application, LoadView will scale alongside your system. If you know the number of simultaneous users or amount of traffic that causes your web application to spill over into additional virtual resources, then you can test those failover processes with a load test to ensure the transition goes smoothly.

Test Automatically Scalable or Elastic Applications

While scalability is often thrown around in conversations about elasticity, there is a difference between the two. Scalability is really about a system being able to handle sustained increases in capacity, while elasticity is simply the ability to handle short bursts of increased load. Having differentiated the two terms, you are still likely to hear them intermingled during discussions about capacity planning and load testing.

LoadView can be used for both peak capacity planning, as well as testing the elasticity of systems. Some examples include:

• Load Testing Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF).
• Testing the Elasticity of Google AutoScaler (now part of the Compute Engine API).
• Optimizing a Scalable WordPress Environment.
• Load Testing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Load Test Cloud Elasticity

When people talk about a web application or cloud-based infrastructure being “scalable,” or “elastic,” what they are often referring to is that the system should be able to ramp up resources to handle sudden, additional load when there is a high demand, and then scale back to a minimal supply of resources to meet a minimal demand. This helps reduce the cost of maintaining an infrastructure that supports peak performance to only be necessary during those times of peak performance.

LoadView allows you to set up a load curve that can increase the number of concurrent users, in order to apply an increased demand on elastic infrastructure. This can spur automatic increases in computing supply if the elasticity of the cloud is set up correctly. If not, LoadView can help you identify the points of failure in your system, so you can fix any issues before they are found by actual users.