Reinventing Load Testing With LoadNinja

Performance testing has become an almost ubiquitous need for websites and web applications that want to scale their usage and growth. The impact of a poor performance testing strategy goes beyond just user retention, as research shows how fixing bugs in productions costs 50% more to fix. Clearly, having poor application performance costs money and affects user growth, two of the biggest metrics of success for most businesses.

But performance testing, of which load testing is the most popular, is hindered by outdated technologies and processes enforced by conventional load testing tools that demand performance testers spend an inordinate amount of time setting up the load tests and battling complex GUIs.  

We decided to do something about it. We decided to build LoadNinja.

LoadNinja, is a cloud-based platform for engineers and performance professionals to load test web applications. LoadNinja delivers a rare combination of efficiency, accuracy, and actionable performance data, and unlike traditional load testing platforms that require tedious programming and correlation of dynamic application aspects, LoadNinja allows the engineer to focus more on building applications that scale and less on building load testing scripts.

 

The Challenges With Load Testing Today

Outdated Processes

Traditionally, performance testing was a centralized function, overseen by a central team of performance testers who load tested web applications over long cycles. This was a slow process and involved careful planning. As teams adopted agile methodologies to move faster, testing, especially performance testing always fell behind due the associated overhead effort and costs involved.

The Shift-Left methodology has become popular due to this very reason of developing a culture of involving testing early on in software. For the Shift-Left methodology to work, teams would need lightweight and flexible tools that fit the speeds of their software development counterparts. This is where the second problem arises.

Complicated Tools

Conventional load testing tools record business transactions in test scripts by capturing HTTP based protocol traffic. This results in scripts that are voluminous, hard to read and require dynamic correlation of session state for simple playback, making the entire load testing effort time consuming and strenuous. Conventional tools also provide proprietary request-response data that require a lot of translation to be made actionable for the development team trying to fix any performance issues.

All of these challenges created by conventional tools make it extremely hard for agile and devops teams to move fast and incorporate load testing into their development and delivery workflows.

 

A Better Way To Load Test With LoadNinja

The frustrations induced by conventional load testing tools forced us to look for a better way of doing load testing. This led us to building LoadNinja. LoadNinja brings a lot of great innovations to the performance tester. These include

Efficiency: LoadNinja’s revolutionary InstaPlay Recorder allows you to create even the most complex test scripts and play them back in minutes without any additional effort, saving you hours’ worth of work. The efficiency gains are at least 50% from this approach, especially when load tests are run frequently in an agile and devops setting, enable teams to focus their efforts solely on load testing and saves time previously spent in creating and massaging scripts in advance of load tests.

Accuracy: Unlike the load generated by conventional tools that use vendor developed homegrown browser emulators, LoadNinja’s TrueLoad technology uses real browsers at scale for load tests, creating the most realistic and accurate representation of load on the infrastructure supporting the web application under test.
 

Metrics that matter: The power of using real browsers for all of your load generation is seen in the performance data returned by LoadNinja. Traditionally, load testing tools return request-response times in test results, which need to be further introspected and deciphered in order to be usable by developers and performance testers. LoadNinja obviates this additional step and directly provides actionable data in the form of browser-based navigation timings that developers and performance testers are used to working with every day.

LoadNinja also provides two additional innovations in the form of the VU Inspector and the VU Debugger. The VU Inspector allows you to visualize the degradation as your virtual users generate load against the application. When a virtual user encounters an issue, the VU Debugger can be used to connect and interact with the erring virtual user’s browser to gather additional diagnostic information about the problem. 

 

Getting Started With Load Testing

Load testing shouldn’t be a complicated and cumbersome process. We aim to empower anyone involved in the delivery of a web application, be it the technical engineering team, or your creative marketing team, to load test their web apps and ensure their performance under any condition.

Sign up for LoadNinja today and be a part of the next generation of load testing.