Load Testing Tools for Websites

What are Load Testing Tools?

Load testing tools simulate load environments from the real world to be placed upon web and mobile applications. Simulation of real-world load environments happens in a safe, controlled environment. These tools monitor and analyze the performance of websites and mobile applications in simulated environments and detect slowdowns and bottlenecks.

Load testing software helps detect issues at an early stage based on real-world test scenarios in real browsers and high-traffic incidents. These scenarios often involve playback testing and WebSocket protocols. In playback testing, you can re-run a test without any manual intervention, and the WebSocket protocol enables full-duplex communication.

Who Can Use Load Testing Tools?

Operations department: It is used by operation teams to keep a tab on system performance and identify any critical issues before they affect the users. The outcome of the testing is used to optimize the system and ensure its effectiveness and reliability under all conditions.

Quality Assurance department: The QA department uses the software to make sure that the system meets all the performance requirements, and it can seamlessly handle the maximum user load.

Project managers: Project managers use performance testing tools for determining the system capacity and make efficient growth plans. The testing result helps them in determining the maximum user load-handling capacity and allocating resources accordingly.

How to Use Load Testing Tools?

The following are some key steps for using the load testing tools first, you need to select a testing tool that fits your needs and budget.

• Establish the main objective and scope of the test. Then you need to determine the scenarios you want to replicate and the metrics you want to evaluate.
• Create test scenarios or scripts that simulate the real-world behavior of your users. Make sure that the script contains link clicking, page navigation, form submission, and many other actions.
• You need to set up the testing tool to simulate the desired user base and maximum workload. This could involve setting up virtual computers, establishing network settings, and replicating other critical parameters.
• Run the load testing process and keep an eye on the results. Analyze the test data to find out the performance issues and evaluate the metrics like response time, CPU usage, and error rates.
• Use the test findings to improve your website or application. This could involve adjusting the server settings, code optimization, or adding more resources.
• You can repeat the test to evaluate if the changes you've made have improved the performance or not.

Major Benefits of Using Load Testing Tools?

Load testing tools offer numerous benefits that help in ensuring the seamless performance of web applications, hardware, and software systems. Some of the key benefits are:

• Improved Scalability

  When software poorly handles concurrent users, it causes problems like memory leaks and inefficient usage of resources. Load testing will help your software team to find out the operational capability or bottlenecks. When the testing team is well aware of the product limitations, they can easily implement the changes required to make it more scalable.

• Minimizes the Cost of Failure

  The cost of identifying performance issues at an early stage is significantly less when compared to later stages. If your web application starts to show its bugs after the launch, it can irreparably damage your company’s reputation.

  You will either have to recall the application and move back to a previous version or halt your web app until all the bugs are fixed. Therefore, the resulting costs are always going to be taxing for your company and damage it severely. Gartner reports that downtime can cost companies as much as $300,000 per hour, on average.

  Load testing enables you to detect these problems before your web app goes into a production environment. As a result, it is considerably easier to resolve these issues and you don’t need to pay the costs of post-launch error removal.

• Reduce the risk of system downtime

  Load testing, allows testers to replicate real-time website, app, or software usage under different loads. When they are subjected to an increased amount of traffic, the testing tool can outline errors that can cause downtime. Hence, it becomes easier to resolve problems before they lead to downtimes and lagging issues.

• Facilitate simultaneous usage

  As the applications are accessed via the internet, concurrent usage is a compulsory requirement. Thanks to loading testing software, you can analyze the number of concurrent users it can handle simultaneously. For websites and applications, this tool is as essential as crash testing for cars.

• Customer retention

  If your website or application doesn't work properly, you could lose both existing and new clients. Therefore, website load testing tools empower you to prevent website crashes, ensure that you retain your loyal customers and get new customers due to positive customer reviews and word-of-mouth publicity.

Key Features of Load Testing Tools?

Load testing tools are used for simulating user traffic on an application or system to analyze its performance under heavy loads. Let's look at some prominent features of Load Testing Tools

• Debugger: Some latest software testing tools come with a debugging feature that allows you to debug your applications in real-time.
• Cloud hosting: The best performance testing tools are hosted on the cloud and do not require any server machine or upkeep.
• Real-world data: Load testing software provides actual world data, ensuring optimal performance of hundreds of devices and networks.
• AI capabilities: Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence(AI) capabilities, you can automatically detect bugs during the testing phase.
• Smarter test executions: Some new-age tools application load testing tools carry out intelligent tests by auto-maintaining and auto-generating test assets.
• Virtual simulation: Loading tools have the capability to mimic virtual users at network protocol and application UI levels. It provides a true and effective understanding of the UX impact at scale.
• Automatic recording of load tests: Load testing software lets you record different scenarios of website usage in your web browser. In a non-browser application, you can capture website traffic from mobile applications or rich internet applications (RIA) and generate a test case with a single mouse click.
• Supported technologies and protocols: The load testing tools support a wide range of protocols such as AJAX, SOAP, HTTP, HTTPS, binary WCF, and XML
• Authentication: The load testing software supports multiple authentication methods such as Kerberos, NTLM, Basic, and Web Forms. You can also give a unique identity to a virtual user by providing data sets with login credentials.
• Scripting: You can create the whole test case through the wizard-based user interface and GUI without using any script. Moreover, for more comprehensive testing rules, you get a scripting platform based on.NET and Fiddler.

Latest Load Testing Tools Trends

Let's look at some latest trends of load testing so that you can stay abreast with the current or upcoming modifications in this domain.

The latest trends of load testing tools are:

• AI automation

  As the customer behavior on a platform fluctuates, performance testing scripts also change a lot. By using machine learning software and artificial intelligence software, you can discover different patterns in the user journey and their actual actions on the platform. These patterns can be used to create a performance-testing model that will ensure that your load-testing scripts depict the actual behavior of the user.

  By developing performance-based testing models, you might uncover new problems in the testing system. The AI-supported performance testing comes with the ability to optimize test suites by eliminating unnecessary test cases and ensuring flawless test coverage through keyword analysis.

• SaaS software

  Testing at the cloud scale can be initiated and executed at a lightning-fast speed. This is possible due to SaaS, cloud-based testing, open architecture, and self-service. The legacy tools require a significant set-up and meticulous configuration, but when you use SaaS-based tools, it only requires a few simple steps to install and get going. Moreover, these tools also come with a high level of interoperability, which elevates the performance by a wide margin.

• Open Architectures

  The open architecture has public specifications and users can easily ass, upgrade or swap components. As open architecture allows prompt and affordable migration, it will be widely used in the coming years.

  Nowadays, performance testing is using internet protocols and TCP/IP for performance tracking. Although the components work together, their performance is separately analyzed. A cloud-based environment will be one of the most critical components of an open architecture.

• Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence Analysis

  Machine learning algorithms can use patterns to forecast and assist you in only creating for the existing demand. One of the most useful methods for assessing responses to customers' emotions is sentiment analysis. It evaluates the plain text and assigns a numerical score according to expressed sentiments. Moreover, the reactions of your customers can give you a plethora of information.

• Changing Requirements

  When testing applications in an old fashioned way, testers must understand the main goal of the software, as they have to make requirements documents as well as service level agreements. Then based on this, testing is then done on the application.

  On the contrary, performance requirements are seen as a changing concept in a DevOps-based environment. Moreover, a performance engineer ensures that keeps a tab on systems and finds prompt solutions to issues.

• Factors to Consider When Selecting Load Testing Tools

  Selecting the perfect load-testing tool is a critical step in determining the load-bearing capacity of a system. Here are some of the key points to keep in mind to buy the best software for your business.

• Support for Agile & DevOps testing:

  The load testing tool must connect with Agile & DevOps tools. This makes it easy to pair with frameworks for continuous development and integration like Maven and Jenkins. It should also support shift left testing by enabling the reduction of test and build cycles, thus helping to reduce the testing time.

• Protocol-level recording and playback

  The performance testing tools should be able to record communication between two different tiers of the system and should efficiently play back the automatically generated script. These testing tools should also support HTTP and other common and important protocols.

• API Programming support

  In applications that don't allow recording, the effective option would be to make API calls from the set script. Hence, the utilization of API scripts and website scripting services should be facilitated by the help of load tools.

• Support for mobile and desktop Applications

  Given the constantly evolving technology and the popularity of smart apps, load-testing software should support both desktop and mobile applications. Moreover, a wide variety of mobile apps, including hybrid, web, native as well as secure applications should be supported by your chosen tool.

• Support scaling of users

  There won't be any problem when you have to simulate a handful of users, but when you have to simulate numerous users then it is imperative to have the right loading tool at your disposal. The load testing software differs on how it can handle large amounts of information and what resources it requires according to per simulated user.

5 Best Load Testing Tools