Web Application Performance Measurement and Tuning

To combat the growing problem of poor web application performance and safeguard the rising amount of business revenue gained via online channels, load testing strategies, tools and services have experienced a transformation in terms of both awareness and adoption.

Business requirements for web application load testing and application performance testing as a means for ongoing performance measurement and tuning have become more rigorous over the past several years.

Measurements derived with load testing tools should provide a clear understanding of where performance bottlenecks reside and aid in infrastructure and capacity planning of computing resources. When derived from meaningful load tests, results serve as a guide to helping IT staff make informed decisions about the performance of their applications and infrastructures.

A solid load testing strategy must complement performance monitoring and analysis in a production environment and, in turn, production monitoring and analysis should be leveraged to improve the accuracy of load tests.

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Challenges of creating and managing robust applications

Application availability is the first quality encountered by customers, but the last one to be determined by the development process, because it depends on the quality of everything else that happens during design, development, and testing web applications. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and developing RIAs will uncover any weaknesses in an enterprise’s development and SLM processes.

RIAs inevitably involve running complex code on the client, and use more complex and application-specific strategies to manage the communication between browser and server. Making such complex code efficient and bugfree is not a task to be taken lightly.

Better tools are needed to help us meet the challenges of creating and managing robust applications; today, while the Adobe suite of Flash tools is a little more mature, Ajax development and application performance testing tools are still in their infancy. The Open Ajax initiative may help to address this issue. Therefore deploying an RIA successfully will demand more resources— skills, tools, process, time, and (of course) money—than would be required to deploy a more traditional Web-based application in which all application logic is executed on the server. Enterprises that decide to employ the technology must be prepared to invest more in design, development, testing and management to make it successful.

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Challenges And Surprises With Web Load Testing

To gauge a Web site’s capacity and scalability, web load testing is one of the most effective ways. But the load tests need to simulate real scenarios. The huge numbers and ranges of variables involved in Web site load testing will always present challenges and surprises.

A load testing scenario can be made significantly more realistic by simulating the behavior of tolerant and

an intolerant user. Familiarity is a major factor in how quickly a simulated user navigates from one page to the next. As with latency tolerance, different people will behave in different ways: users that are very familiar with the Web site move more rapidly (therefore creating more load per unit of time) than users who are visiting the Web site for the first time and need to read and understand how the Web site is organized to go from one page to the next.

You can also run simple in-house experiments using employees and their friends and family to determine, for example, the page viewing time differences between new and returning users.

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Website Monitoring Service Must Haves

 From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good Website monitoring service guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second.

A Website that is frequently inaccessible is likely to destroy customer loyalty and lose business. Ensuring that all of the elements of a Website are functioning properly is critical to maximizing your company's Web investment.For maximum control over your Website, Website monitoring must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate.

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Effectively Monitor The Impact Of Third-Party Performance

How third-party content can impact Web site performance and why effective targeted monitoring of third-party content and add-ons is vital to IT, Web operations managers, and business stakeholders to ensure optimal Web site performance and a good user experience.

A slick-looking Web site is ultimately of limited effectiveness if all of the its bells and whistles are an impediment to system performance. Hence, the monitoring of system performance at the end-user/UI level is extremely important to ensuring a consistently excellent user experience.

By using the proper web performance tools in a targeted manner, both business managers and developers can effectively monitor the impact of third-party performance both on the individual component level and in the aggregate.

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Enterprises must re-evaluate their approach to website performance management

In an RIA, the time to complete a Web page download may no longer correspond to something a user perceives as important, because (for example) the client engine may be prefetching some of the downloaded content for future use. 

Standard tools that measure the time for Web page downloads to complete can record misleading data for RIAs. In some cases, the client engine may not even invoke any standard Web page downloads once the application is launched, using asynchronous background communications for all server requests.

To implement RIAs successfully, enterprises must re-evaluate their approach to website performance  management. Instead of relying on the definition of physical Web pages to drive the subdivision of application response times, RIA developers or tool users must break the application into logical pages.

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Improving Website Responsiveness Involves Tradeoffs

It is easy for a measurement tool to sit on a server and measure all requests for service—and this kind of measurement has its uses, especially when load testing or investigating bottlenecks. But because of the variety of implementation possibilities, a common problem when measuring RIAs is that related requests may appear to originate from separate units of work on the client.

Correlating seemingly separate measurements with a particular application activity, task, or phase is tricky. The more complex the client/server relationship, especially when it involves concurrent interactions, the harder it becomes for measurement and analysis tools to perform that correlation properly.

Having more design and implementation options also creates new opportunities for developers to make performance-related mistakes. Accidentally or deliberately, developers can implement “chatty” client/server communication styles that perform extremely slowly under some workload conditions. Even with thorough testing, some of these problems may remain undiscovered until after the application is deployed unless applications are subjected to a systematic SLM process that includes measurement
activities to identify, investigate, and fix them.

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