| Tuning your website performance |
The first impulse of a developer, who has just finished working on a new web-application or website, is to publish it. If he can’t withstand this will and immediately begins the production, in most cases regrets come very soon: suddenly a lot of unexpected mistakes appear, certain parts don’t work as they are supposed to, the site or application tends to collapse unexpectedly, etc. In other words, the project appears unprepared for real Internet activity and real traffic. And every developer knows that visitors rate site badly if it loads slowly and worse still, if it’s unavailable.
To prepare your website for high traffic strain and ensure that visitors will get the best possible impression you need to test how it behaves in different conditions and modify its contents according to the revealed weak places. This can be done in several ways: by hiring a team of testers and making them simultaneously browse your site, or by using special testing software. Whereas manual approach requires a lot of money and time, automated tests are much easier, faster and provide more accurate results.
Let’s take a look at some specific piece of software, for example Novosoft Testing Master ( www.siteloadtesting.com). Testing Master can create hundreds or thousands of virtual users that cause huge loads on server applications. Virtual users are fully customizable. Unlike many other similar tools, Testing Master allows you to base test scenario on your actual behavior when you browse your website. Let’s say, you have a software directory. You may set virtual users to read products descriptions, to use searching system, to submit orders, to update the catalog, etc, emulating real loads experienced by a website in the Internet.
Testing Master gathers statistics and provides complete information on how the site performs under stress and where it can be improved. Graphs and reports are given in real-time, what enables you to stop the test if you happen to identify a problem quickly. The results are provided at different levels of detail what allow you to reveal exact places of your website’s bottlenecks and breaking points. Having tested your website, you can not only receive complete information on what you can improve, but also predict its performance in future, when it will be hundred times more popular.
As we see, testing websites before production is essential. Webmasters who encounter performance troubles or lack the ability to test their sites are sure to benefit here. Do remember: optimizing websites with load testing software helps to make the user experience great. And this is of supreme importance if you want to have a popular site.
Testing Master official website http://www.siteloadtesting.com
Article Source: UnArchived Articles
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