Loadster™
Loadster™ tests the performance, stability, and scalability of your web application. It simulates a large number of users doing whatever activities your real users would do. This helps you to discover and fix performance issues before your users are ever impacted.
Performance problems can be just as crippling as functional bugs, yet without a professional-grade tool they can be notoriously hard to detect ahead of time and fix. Because of this, software teams worldwide have made load testing an integral part of their process.
Some problems that can occur under heavy load include:
- general slowness and unresponsiveness
- data integrity problems (depending on how the application was written)
- pages that only partially load and look ugly
- complete lock-up, resulting in a system outage
Most users will only wait a few seconds for a page to load. A site that is performing slowly -- regardless of the reason -- can often cost thousands of dollars a day in lost business.
Eliminate bottlenecks
Modern web applications have a lot of moving parts. In the ideal situation, the different layers and components of an application will work seamlessly together to create a fast, stable, and reliable user experience.
Unfortunately, this seldom happens in real life. One of the components will invariably be the slowest, with the effect of bogging down the entire application while other components wait for it to do its job.
Isolating and fixing the bottleneck can make a huge difference in overall application performance.
Reduce hardware costs
When an application runs slowly, it's always tempting to solve the problem by throwing more hardware at it.
The truth is, this is almost never the best solution. It's rare to find software that fully utilizes the CPU, memory, and network resources available to it.
Instead, by actually understanding how your application responds to heavy load, you can isolate and fix performance problems in the code as well as the environment.
This often translates into thousands of dollars saved for our customers.
Prevent disastrous crashes
People nowadays have short attention spans. If your pages take more than a few seconds to load, they will probably go somewhere else.
Even worse is when a busy site stops responding altogether. When this happens, business grinds to a halt. Sometimes only a few additional users can make the difference between a site that is merely slow and one that is completely unusable.
By benchmarking your site's performance under various usage levels, you can be sure ahead of time that it will scale gracefully.