CustomerCentrix has made available LoadStorm 2.0, a new cloud-based web performance testing tool that delivers cost-effective enterprise-class load testing required to ensure an organization’s web application or website performance under stressful loads. It can simulate hundreds of thousands of website visits and visitor actions from many geographic areas. Fully detailed reports then help users remedy web performance issues. Use of LoadStorm 2.0 can reduce time spent on and the cost of load testing by more than 50 percent compared with traditional tools.
LoadStorm 2.0 is now available at www.loadstorm.com as a full-featured Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. It’s ideal for web developers, application managers, ecommerce managers, QA leaders, and others that must ensure web application performance. The tool is available as self-service or bundled with professional performance engineering consulting. With consulting, LoadStorm’s performance engineers work closely with customers to meet their testing needs. This includes designing tailored test scripts, executing tests, analyzing results and / or providing optimization advice. The consulting services are designed to ensure clients get the most value from their testing and helps to avoid common mistakes.
Key Features
LoadStorm 2.0 boasts a variety of features. This includes a capability to easily record a test script without coding, which can then be modified within the LoadStorm application. Scripts allow testers to parameterize virtual user (VUser) actions from generated data or uploaded files. Actions include logins, shopping cart processes, searches, downloads, auction bidding, registration, and more. Testers also have access to real-time actionable analytics provided in graphs and reports. Customers can drill down into the performance metrics for specifics on a variety of elements. They include performance details on servers, scripts, resource types, VUser, or web pages. With this performance intelligence, testers can pinpoint scalability bottlenecks and potential problem areas in any web application.
Calculated performance metrics include response times, throughput, requests per second, error rate, data transferred, average throughput, and more. The testing tool also provides performance measurement of page completion times throughout the test. Realistic traffic is simulated and works like a Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer/or Opera browser. VUsers accurately put stress on the servers for all types of behavior such as AJAX-driven requests, form posts, parallel connections, and JSON payload transfers. Test scripts can be weighted during a test run in order to generate the correct percentage of VUsers signing-in, searching, and so on. Tests can be run for long durations to identify specific potential problems like memory leaks. For example, a test may run for eight hours with scheduled volume ramping patterns.
“Countless organizations have a lot riding on their websites that includes revenue from ecommerce or simply ensuring uptime to not lose users,” said Phillip Odom, LoadStorm’s Director of Performance Engineering. “As a result, load testing has become critical but, for many it’s still out of reach. It’s either too expensive, too complex, or too time-consuming. So, people often risk going without load testing and we end up reading in the news, practically every week, about a critical web application crashing. With LoadStorm 2.0, we’re addressing user requests for a load testing tool that is cost-effective, simple to use, and quick to provide results.”
According to Forrester Research analyst Rachel Dines the New York Times website had an outage in 2013 that caused a stock drop, Twitter explosion about the incident, and the Wall Street Journal to drop their paywall to try and capture New York Times’ readers. Also last year, Amazon.com went down for a reported 49 minutes, causing a $5 million loss. In addition, Amazon.com has reported that a one second slowdown in a web page load time could be as costly as $1.6 billion in annual sales.
Pricing
The LoadStorm 2.0 cloud load testing tool fully supports comprehensive testing of all web application initiatives. Pricing starts at $39 for 1,000 VUser hours of testing. Another plan is available for $1,999 that has 500,000 VUser hours of testing plus four performance engineering consulting hours. Full pricing is available at http://loadstorm.com/load-testing-cost/.
