Choosing the best software for your business

When you spend $1 for a new mobile game, you don’t care about the price and you want the game right now. There is no need to check competitive products, so, the immediate decision looks reasonable. The situation is different when you choose a software product for your business. In this case you cannot rely on your first impression. You probably have certain expectations regarding the product and you want to make sure that these expectations are met.

The tool you choose should be reliable. You should be confident that it will never stop working suddenly on a changed data input or in other new conditions.

Should meet your business goals now and (at least) in the near future. Note that it is not always possible to fully estimate this in a reasonable time using a demo version or a manual. [...]

Testing Silverlight Applications

If you are going to load test a Silverlight web application with WAPT, first of all you need to install the corresponding extension module that you can download here.

This is a very easy task; you should simply download the file and run it. The module enables support for MSBIN1 format used by Silverlight applications to pass data between the client and server parts.

This format is binary. It can represent any complex data structure containing objects of various types, which can, in turn, contain other objects and so on until we come to some elementary objects like text strings or numbers. [...]

WAPT Module for ASP.net testing

All ASP.net web applications use two specific parameters: __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION. When the client part of such application communicates with the server side, every produced HTTP request includes these two parameters.

Their values are essentially dynamic. In fact, they are changing for each request within a session. Of course, they are also different for different sessions.

This means that you cannot repeat the recorded requests “as is” to produce a copy of the recorded session.

Initially the values are produced by the server part of the application and transferred to the client inside the body of each response. After receiving the updated values the client should include them as parameters in the next request. [...]

Efficiency and capacity of load testing tools

If you are looking for a load testing solution to check the performance of your web site, or to start using permanently in your web development process, you may need to analyze various characteristics of many tools before you make your choice. One of such characteristics is the efficiency.

If you want to test a web application used internally by your company staff, you may need to check that it supports, say, 100 concurrent user sessions.

This is not a very big load for any tool. You will hardly need more than one generating system to run such test.

The situation is completely different, if you need to stress test a popular internet portal. A load of 100,000 concurrent users can be a good check for it. [...]

Load testing a mobile website for iPhone

While mobile devices are replacing PCs for almost all possible applications, the Internet is also changing to address this technology shift. On the other hand, despite the unbelievable progress in the performance characteristics of smartphones and handheld computers, they are doomed to stay different from PCs by one parameter: screen size.

That is why most web sites offer different content when they are visited from a mobile device.

Of course, this content is usually just a reduced version with a very similar functionality. However the implementation of the underlying web application can be different.

As a result, your web site can experience significantly different performance problems when it is accessed by multiple mobile users.