It’s tough coming up with an analogy for the load put on a web server so here goes. Imagine you’re a web server and your visitors are cans of tomatoes. If you have one or two cans of food, you can carry them pretty easy. Pile a few hundred in your arms and none of the food can get where they need to be. Now, if you could somehow reduce the size of each can, distribute them properly, and get help carrying them, you may be able to carry hundreds.
A web server works in somewhat the same way. A few hundred visitors and your server may have plenty of resources to display and bring the visitor where they’re going. But pile on thousands or tens of thousands and the server crawls to a stop. It’s not as though some of the visitors can get there and some can’t… all of them are stopped. Your pages display very slowly and even stop loading altogether. It’s what our site was suffering from the last few weeks.
The problem is that most companies often develop or stage a website on a server that has no load on it. Then they put it into production, the visitors come, and it quickly goes downhill.
In order to prepare for this, performance and load testing services can assist. Blitz is a cloud-based performance and load-testing service, there is no software to install. The service supports up to 200,000 virtual users from 8 different worldwide locations (up to 50,000 per region) to load test your app or website. This allows users to compare different software stacks, hardware resources, and service providers. Ultimately, it allows you to discover progress regressions before your visitors do.
Blitz has been created to help application and website developers manage and test performance throughout the development lifecycle. Through development, staging, production and operations, it is critical to ensure that your application meets the highest levels of user satisfaction.
Blitz offers great features for ongoing quality assurance programs:
- Complex transactions – Whether you want to test a web page or a complex transaction , Blitz makes it easy for you to determine the number of users you can support.
- Detailed feedback – Get detailed statistics and feedback in real time, and in plain English. Reports that can help you debug your infrastructure, identify bottlenecks in your application and just determine if you need to add another server.
- Plugins – With our extension for Chrome or add-on for Firefox , just navigating to a webpage and run a performance test. Blitz takes care of the cookies, authentication and all the other underlying complexities.
- Automation – With the Ruby GEM and full integration with Continuous Integration servers like Atlassian’s Bamboo CI server, automated performance testing can ensure that no code push can cause a poor experience for your users.
Timeout Monitoring with Load:
Response Time Monitoring with Load:
Blitz has Development API clients that run in Java, Maven, Node.js, Python, Perl, and PHP.
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