Website Load Testing Yuliya Boedeker And James C. Helm, Ph. D. INNOVATION 2002 May 16, 2002

Objective  The objective of this presentation is to show the  What are the website load testing and stress testing  Reasons why web sites choke  Testing Tools for web applications

What is the web site load testing Load testing is an evaluation of system performance under normal conditions, all the way up to the maximum number of users supported by your configuration.

What is the web site stress testing Stress testing is a determination of how the system behaves when pushed "over the edge", including how well it recovers from being pushed in this fashion.

Reasons why web sites choke Memory Leaks-These are the bane of many a site, and are almost always due to one of three things: -sloppy programming practices -poorly written third-party components -older components in the operating system or software layers

Reasons why web sites choke Resource Locking - happens in databases, where records are "locked" against being modified so that reliable results can be returned. Bottlenecks - area in system operation where the flow of data is constrained and causes everything else to slow down.

Reasons why web sites choke Transactional Problems- problems with detailed interchange of information between the site and its user, and often involves some- thing that is processed in several distributed steps on the backend. Hardware Limitations - hardware you have just isn't enough to support the work you need to do.

Testing Tools Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool  Primarily designed to serve static pages  Tests Web applications and sees how they perform under stress  Can be scripted through a browser by recording transactions and redirecting it through the Stress Tool  User don't have to write the code for the test by hand, can simply fire up the browser, browse normally, record actions, and then use that as the stress test.

Testing Tool Astra Load Test  It's powerful, flexible, highly programmable  It uses a browser as a preliminary scripting tool  It is available for different platforms like Windows NT, 2K, XP, Me, Win 95/98

Conclusions  A load test emulates user activity and analyzes the effect of the real-world user environment on an application.  Load testing can identify problematic parts of a web application before it is accessed by hundreds or thousands of users.  Load testing uncovers fatal errors