Lightening The Load-Testing Load
By Jennifer deJong
January 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
John Camp remembers it like it was yesterday.
Just as 34,000 students at Wayne State University were getting ready to begin a new semester, the Web application that lets them sign up for classes froze. “It locked up for a full two hours, and students resorted to registering by phone,” said Camp, CIO for the Detroit-based university. “[Administrators] were concerned that enrollment would fall.”
The culprit turned out to be the database that drove the application. “No one had exposed it to a full load of 1,000 simultaneous registrations,” he said. “We had tested 10,000 functional transactions, but we had not tested a true simulation of everything.”
Camp’s experience is not uncommon. Load testing—making sure an application will perform well under expected usage—is a tricky business. It requires intimate knowledge of everything, from how an application works and how users are likely to interact with it, to how the production environment is set up, according to analysts, development managers and tool makers. “You have to peer into all the tiers. There are so many moving bits and pieces, so many places where problems can occur,” said Mark Eshelby, product manager for Compuware, which sells testing and other application life-cycle tools. “If you don’t [load test thoroughly enough], you are going to have problems when you go live,” added Camp, who learned that lesson the hard way.
Part of the problem for many shops is that load testing remains an afterthought in the development process, even though the impact of poor performance on the business is well understood, said Voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz. Instead of simply running load tests just before applications are deployed, development teams should architect apps from the get-go with “what-if” performance scenarios in mind, she said. They should also allocate enough time to fix the flaws they find, she added. “You should [set aside] four weeks in June to test the Christmas Web site.”
A planned approach lets testers find out a number of things: “What happens when a Web shopper places an item in a shopping cart? What happens when you decrease the bandwidth? What happens when you have 10,000 [such transactions] coming down the line?” said Eshelby.
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