Testing practice

Load testing a mobile website for iPhone
Testing practice WAPT usage

Load testing a mobile website for iPhone

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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.

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Stress testing a web site with 100,000+ virtual users
Testing practice WAPT usage

Stress testing a web site with 100,000+ virtual users

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It is not a typical load testing project when you need to create 100 thousand virtual users. More than half of all web load tests are conducted with just a thousand virtual users or less, because higher load is not actually anticipated on the target web site in production.

Note that we are not talking about the number of users per day or hour. Those are concurrent users working with the web site simultaneously, in parallel.

At the same time a huge load mentioned in the title of this article is not a fantasy.

Such tests are really required for web sites with growing audience and advanced client functionality. Imagine any web site that delivers customizable user-dependent content updating dynamically: stock quotes, online meetings and chats, monitoring tools, etc. […]

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Creating a load test report
Testing practice

Creating a load test report

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One of the most common questions in load testing is how to create a good test report that you would be able to present to your manager or customer. This big question actually consists of many smaller ones. What to start with? How to create the right test? What load parameters should be applied? How to interpret the results? Which numbers to look at when you browse through a long report generated by a load testing tool?

I will hardly answer all these questions and present the complete methodology in one article. This would be a long story and… it would be too boring. I know that there is a 90% chance that you really need something more simple and ready to use right away. I will simply present an example of the load testing report. A typical one, if you want.

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HTTP Redirects
Testing practice

HTTP Redirects

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Each HTTP response produced by a web site contains status code. Browser uses that code to interpret the meaning of the response. Basically there can be three different cases:

The request has been processed successfully by the server and the response body contains the requested resource (web page, image, etc.).

An error has occurred.

Server redirects the request to a new URL.

In the latter case the response contains a special “Location” header in which the new URL is provided. When browser receives such response, it automatically issues a new request using the specified URL. This way it can be redirected even to a different web site. The whole thing is done automatically, so the user does not see the process in the browser window. […]

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