In other words, Do you know – A single generator can free you up of operational nightmares (costs, other operational overheads) of managing multiple generators in your performance testing infrastructure.
Today, hundreds of thousands of users hit a website on a daily basis. During peak sales it crosses million/s. Expect your web application to slow down a bit if not becoming unresponsive.
Inability to test with high volume traffic
Slow response and unresponsiveness is because of the inability to handle high load. Unprecedented load can cause applications to behave erratically. Generally, the test environments are downscale versions of the production environment and hence even the virtual traffic isn’t a replica of load as seen during production. There are two reasons for this:
1. Cost of generators: since a generator can generate limited number of virtual users. Multiple generators are needed for a sizable load.
2. Infrastructure overheads related to deploying multiple generators needed for massive load.
Regardless of how good the code is, performance testing needs to be multidimensional, for example, data traffic, the number of users, different locations as well as variety in network behavior.
Recreating Production-like Scenario for Testing
And, massive user volume is just one, yet the most important parameter for performance testing.
Various tools are available in the market where a single can generate 1000 users or less. How many generators would be required to generate a million users?
A single generator of Cavisson NetStorm is capable of generating millions of virtual users. At one of the test environments, we’ve achieved 4 million users. NetStorm’s ability to run high volume tests within a controlled lab environment allows multiple executions while “tweaking” appropriate variables being analyzed, with the assurance that other variables will not change.
Cavisson NetStorm does this by using advance multi-threading techniques to generate such a massive volume of virtual users.
You may also want to read my post on recreating production-like scenarios for truthful performance testing.
Or browse following links to learn more:
* Views expressed are my own *
Vanya Singh is responsible for go-to-market strategy of Cavisson Netstorm.
