Monthly Archives: February 2015

When you load test a web application and gradually increase the number of virtual users during the test, you usually expect to see gradually degrading performance parameters such as response time. The number of pages (sessions or hits) per second will reach maximum in some moment and will probably stay the same for the rest of the test despite the growing load. This is simply because the site cannot serve more requests per second, so it has to postpone the new coming ones.

In reality you will probably see something like that, but only for a limited time. When the load goes even higher, you can get another picture that may seem surprising at first glance. It is illustrated by the following three charts. Black line in all charts represents the number of virtual users. Continue reading →