Even the most novice among website owners has at some point or other tested their website performance. However, most of these tests normally focus on loading speed or user experience indices.
- Webserver Stress Tool
- Web Stress Test
- Website Stress Test Tool Free
- Web Application Stress Tool
- Web Page Stress Test
But what about load testing?
- Showing a quick summary and example of url stress test using the Paessler's Webserver Stress Tool 8.- URL Stress Test- Error- Response Time and First Byte.
- The Grinder - The Grinder is a load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test.
- With network stress testing tools you can craft specific packets of any size, and control the exact amount of times a device is sent traffic. This level of customization gives you better flexibility. Most sysadmins will agree that having a proper network stress testing tool saves tons of time, and is a valuable part of their everyday toolkit.
Webserver Stress Tool is a powerful HTTP-client/server test application designed to pinpoint critical performance issues in your website or web server that may prevent optimal experience for your site's.
Although most websites are prone to traffic levels that are usually quite regular, there may be occasions when some sites will have to deal with heavy loads. Examples of these include online stores, or even some government websites.
If your website gets an unexpected spike in the number of visitors over a short period, how well are you equipped to handle it?
Understanding Load Testing
What is load testing?
Load testing is bench-marking a website to see how it performs under various loads.
For example, a test may simulate an increasing number of concurrent visitors landing on your site. It will also record how your site handles them and records them for your reference.
What types of “load” are tested?
Depending on the tool you choose to load test your site with, each may come with different features. The most basic will simply involve simulating an ever increasing load and halting when your site crashes.
Other tools may be capable of generating a simulated load that mimics different user behaviour, such as performing queries, changing pages, or loading other functions. Some may even be able to map out logical flows for each individual scenario.
Load Testing Tools to Consider
Depending on their complexity, some load testing tools can be quite expensive. However, there are cheaper options in the market and some are even free for use. I’ve included a mixture of these below for your reference, including a couple of open source options.
1. Loadview by Dotcom Monitor
Website: https://k6.io/ Webserver Stress Tool Price: From $270.73/mo Load Ninja lets you load-test with real browsers based on recorded scripts and then helps analyze performance results. Its use of real browsers at scale means that this tool helps recreate a more realistic environment and end result for testing. Results can be analyzed in real-time and thanks to the handy tools the system provides, your scripting time can be reduced by as much as 60%. Internal applications can be tested as well, both with proxy-based fixed IPs or your own range of dynamic IPs (by using a whitelister). Features Price: From $0 With an entry-level free community account that supports tests from 50 virtual users, LoadRunner is available even to the newest website owners. However, if you scale it up to high levels the cost rises exponentially. This Cloud-based service also offers the use of an Integrated Development Environment for unit tests. It supports a wide range of application environments including Web, Mobile, WebSockets, Citrix, Java, .NET, and much more. Be aware that LoadRUnner can be pretty complex and has a steep learning curve. Features Price: From $0 Compared to what we’ve shown so far, Loader is a much simpler and more basic tool. Its free plan supports load testing with up to 10,000 virtual users which is enough for most moderate traffic websites. Unfortunately you will need to have a paid plan to access more advanced features such as advanced analytics, concurrent tests, and priority support. It is easy to use though since basically you just add your site, specify the parameters, then let the test run. Features Price: From $0 Gatling comes in two flavors, Open Source or Enterprise. The former lets you load-test as an integration with your own development pipeline. It includes both a web recorder and report generator with the plan. The Enterprise version has on-premise deployments or alternatively, you can opt for a Cloud version based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although both of these versions are feature-packed, the Enterprise version supports a few extras that don’t come with Open Source. For example, it has a more usable management interface and supports a wider range of integrations. Features Price: From $0 Grinder is open sourced all the way and is probably the only truly free option on this list. However, it has to be run locally in your own development environment and needs a few extra such as Java in order to work. However, being open source it has been adopted widely and developers have come up with a plentiful number of plugins which vastly extend it in terms of both use-ability and functionality. Still, unless you’re a developer or so oriented, The Grinder might be a bit of a handful for you to use. Features If you’ve had a look at most of the tools available, you will probably have noticed that many of them offer either trial accounts or some form of limited free version. This makes them readily available for use for a wide audience. Most website owners need to be concerned about hosting performance since it affects far more than simply user experience. For many business owners, the availability of your website is also a matter of brand reputation. Sites which are growing need to be especially cautious of availability and scalability of the resources used to hosting your website. In most cases a high percentage of user response time is spent on the surface of your site. However, as sites grow in traffic volume this might change. More traffic usually means a disproportionate growth in backend processing and your system will struggle as that spikes. Much will depend on variables unique to your site development, so it isn’t possible to give you a solid number of visitors at which point this will happen. To realistically see how your site performance you need load testing to be done. Exactly when to do it is debatable, but my advice would be to plan ahead and test early. As the very name implies, your core function should be the basic of how your site performs under loads. This will let you observe a number of things such as: When I mentioned how different sites may react differently based on their architecture, that was a signal meant for you to understand that not all sites fail in the same way as well. Some database-intensive sites might fail on that point, while others may suffer IO failures based on server connection loads. Because of this, you need to be prepared to set up a variety of tests to understand how your site and server will cope under various scenarios. Based on those, keep a close eye on a few key metrics such as your server response time, the number of errors cropping up, and what areas those faults may lie in. Generating complex scripts and runs along with the accompanying logic can be difficult. I suggest that you approach load testing incrementally. Start with a brute force test that will simply test your site under a continuously increasing stream of traffic. As you gain experience, add on other elements such as variable behaviour, developing your scripts and logic over time. When it comes to load testing, starting with the basics is better than not getting started at all. If you’re a beginner to all of this, do try to do your testing on an alternate mirror or offline where possible – avoid load testing a live site if you can! If you’re just starting out now, make sure to create a record of your tests. Performance testing is a journey that should accompany the development of your site as it grows. The process can be tiring but remember, not having a record can make future assessments much more difficult for you. One thing they don’t tell you about starting a blog or business site is that someday your website is going to reach its limit. Hosting companies don’t have any interest in informing you about this, and the plugin and theme developers are simply trying to make more sales. So it’s tough to tell whether or not a plugin will conflict with your website when traffic starts increasing. WordPress is a rather strong solution to go with, especially when you opt for a quality hosting platform. However, testing out your website before it’s live is not a realistic way to understand how your site is going to hold up. What happens when the traffic spikes during the holidays? What about when you get a product feature on the news or in a guest blog post? Is your site ready for this type of stress? Stress testing (or load testing) happens when you put a certain amount of stress on a software or technological system in order to test out how well if performs. This stress testing is done in multiple environments. For example, you’ll want to see how a website loads and responds during normal traffic hours. At the same time, it’s a good idea to compare this to peak and even unusually low traffic times. Overall, stress testing means simulating lots of users coming to your site at one time. This way you’re prepared for your success as a website owner. One thing to keep in mind is that you’re not trying to throw everything at your website at once. Seeing if your site will withstand the traffic of Facebook is useless. Why? Because a new website or blog won’t have the same amount of traffic as Facebook. Therefore, you need to evaluate your own numbers and figure out your average visits per day and month. Then you can take the most traffic you’ve received in a period and use that as an estimated benchmark. However, the point of stress testing is often to anticipate for unprecedented traffic. Because of that we recommend being overly generous with your maximum number of visits. We recommend going to each of the following websites, pasting in your URL, then evaluating some of the frontend problems occurring: Each of the sites listed above provide ratings for a multitude of factors. They also offer solutions that you may or may not be able to fix yourself. For example, a caching problem can be solved by a caching plugin, yet combining external CSS and JavaScript may take additional development knowledge. You’ll also get some insights on how quickly your pages are loading up without much traffic at all. This can give you a good starting point for when you go through the actual stress tests. Seeing as how WordPress runs with plugins, there’s no doubt you’ll have at least a few of them for your WordPress install. After determining the plugins that mean the most to your website, install the P3 Profiler plugin. Run the plugin. It gives you a breakdown of how other plugins are affecting the speed and performance of your website. For example, you might discover that one of your most recently installed plugins conflicts with your theme and nearly brings your site to a crawl. Although you can also manage plugins by deactivating and testing, the P3 Profiler expedites the process. The backend is actually where most of the work is going to be done when it comes to supporting higher levels of traffic. Before you go about stress testing, you want to make sure that your backend stack is ready for the real world testing. We suggest you cover the three following steps in order to ensure that your backend is prepared for the process: With all of that in mind, you’re ready to start testing. The only other tip is to run your tests on a staging site (an identical one to your live site). You have two routes to decide between when load testing. The first one involves you walking through it manually, with a DIY procedure. The other involves you choosing a commercial product for running the stress testing for you. Beginners should avoid the DIY route at all costs. However, if you consider yourself more experienced, please see if this is more up your alley. Blazemeter has a great article with some of the most popular opensource stress testing tools. Feel free to take a look at their suggestions. From our perspective you could technically go with anything in that article. However, we have a few favorites: For many people the DIY route is either far too intimidating or too time consuming. If you’re a less experienced developer, or you just don’t want to spend the time manually stress testing all of your sites, I recommend going with a commercial testing solution. Keep in mind that some of these options are pricey, so your best bet is the DIY route if you have no plans to stretch your budget. The Load Impact platform has some affordable monthly plans along with the most user friendly interface out there. Load Impact tests everything from apps to regular WordPress sites, and it has realistic, simulated users to get an idea of what people will actually be doing while on your site. This is particularly important since some users put more resources on your site than others. Load Impact also offers a feature for loading visits from multiple different locations throughout the world. Along with serve monitoring, scenario recording and save-able user scenarios for load testing, the Load Impact tool is definitely one of a kind. Although Load Impact has some cloud tools, it’s originally created to work through the cloud and test the performance of websites and apps. The starter pricing is at $29.99 per month, and its main services include load and server performance testing. The cool part about Blitz is that it runs automatically with the help of the Ruby GEM and Atlassian’s Bamboo CI server. Overall, it ensures that no code pushes are causing problems for your users, and it’s all done in the background. Blitz also provides Chrome and Firefox plugins, which are often nice for people with less experience. The final commercial stress testing option is called Blazemeter. This gem takes JMeter, and some other load testers, to analyze them from locations all over the world. The platform is opensource compatible, and it provides mobile performance testing just in case you’re making an app or mobile site of some sort. The amount of stress testing you complete depends entirely on how safe you’d like to be. Generally, I recommend load testing a website at least once before setting it up for a client or launching it for your business. This way you’ve walked through a few tests to see roughly where your site might break if you reach a certain traffic load. After that you should consider stress testing as your organization grows. Think about it: Your initial stress test might say that you’re good with up to 1,000 visits per week. Your company isn’t remotely close to that during the first year so you have nothing to worry about. But what about during the second year when your sales really start to pick up? We suggest you commit to a yearly or bi-yearly stress testing regiment, fully understanding how much your website can take. If you have any questions about how to stress test a WordPress website, please let us know in the comments section below.3. Load Ninja
4. LoadRunner by Micro Focus
5. Loader
6. Gatling
7. The Grinder
When to Load Test Your Website?
What to Check for When Load Testing?
Conclusion: Some is Better than None
Web Stress Test
What Do We Mean By Stress Testing?
Evaluating Your Current Performance
Eliminating Problem Plugins
The Backend Stack
Load Testing: How to Do It and Which Options You Have
The DIY Route
Commercial Options
Website Stress Test Tool Free
If you’re more into testing from the cloud:
Web Application Stress Tool
In Conclusion
Web Page Stress Test