LoadRunner:Load Testing -things to do

pcl2004_27

Description

      Load testing


Solution

      Things to consider:
Always functionally test your site before load testing it. There is no point in load testing a broken site. There are several automated functional testing tools available. Often times you can take your functional test, and re-use it in the load-testing tool to save time.

Second, you want to test the scalability of your application, or architecture. You should test for 10 ?20% over you peak traffic levels. Many times peak traffic is in the form of concurrent users, but can be measured in pages/sec, hits/sec, MB/sec. For web based commerce concurrent users represents a very realistic load. So if you site has peak 500 people you should test at 550 to 600 concurrent users/sessions. Note that for this test you want to turn off functional checks, we are specifically testing to see if the hardware can handle the load.

Lastly, after you have SUCCESSFULLY completed the first two steps you move into load testing with functional checks. This determines if your application scales accurately with load, or if it starts to drop images, or links when heavily loaded. I recommend a stepped or incremental approach here. Try it with just the page layout, and links being functionally verified. Then move to checking the URLs of the links, then add images, and finally entire page checks. This process will allow you to identify what content may be suffering and when.

Where you find the problems and how to rectify them is more challenging, dependants on your system architectur, and comes with experience. Here are some things that I have found true. Web Server and Web Application Server software configuration are the most common culprits, not hardware. You should start your analysis with these two, then proceed to checking their hardware. (I.e. CPU load, memory usage, available hard drive cache, etc..) After those have been exhausted move to your network, check your load balance, routers, and gateway.