©1996- Aspire Systems
In today’s digitally dependent marketplace, people are reliant on the World Wide Web be it for software or apps both on the professional and personal front. While operations and functionalities may seem all hunky-dory for most of its lifetime, there may be instances or days when uncertain circumstances like an excess workload or increased usage may cause it to fault, occasionally beyond your control. With a robust performance testing strategy in place, these root causes can be proactively taken care of even before deployment.
Performance is an important part of the software development lifecycle and is a pivotal factor in measuring great user experience. It is seen as a necessity in the ongoing digital revolution now more than ever as slow loading or non-responsive webpages catapults a negative on the revenue.
For instance, when an existing retail website is being revamped to include the latest features in its new web application, there is a lot of front-end work that goes into its development. Additionally, third-party integrations like payment gateways or digital wallets must also work in sync with the systems. This can be tested with unit and integration tests to ensure the application can scale to thousands of simultaneous users before it is ready for go-live. However, with load testing tools like Apache JMeter to calculate application performance, requests are measured only on the protocol level-side. The protocol-based tests are unable to extract information from the front end and its impact on user experience. With real-browser testing gaining momentum, enterprises can put it to good use to deploy functionally fit webpages or applications.
As a traditional form of performance testing, it focuses majorly on application performance leaving all the actions supported by browsers and also not accounting for the HTML rendering. The metrics measured can evaluate how the application will perform in the long run. By simulating real users, the testing team can identify bottlenecks with load testing and examine behavioral patterns across a variety of scenarios. With unit and integration tests conducted to make sure the code produces appropriate results and all the segments fit together; one cannot determine how the webpage will present itself under immense workloads as it does not always match the actual user experience.
In circumstances where you are not sure what to expect, real-browser testing can play a key role. It can clearly assess how end users are accessing the application from the UI front.
Performance can be measured from the point where the load is generated at the API/Protocol level
Transaction wise response time can be identified with the help of simulated API calls and custom requests
The response time is measured from the time the request is sent and received from the server
Time-consuming and incapable of providing a holistic view of performance
End-to-end response time is immeasurable as the browser rendering time to load the XHR resources cannot be measured with protocol-level testing
Simulates only network traffic and ignores modern web technologies consisting of several client-side scripts
Testing scenarios and results vary across different browsers and browser version
When it comes to performance testing for webpages, page load time is one of the main measurement metrics. According to studies, a two-second delay in load time results in abandonment rates of up to 87%.
The conventional way of performance testing on the protocol-level always excludes the HTML rendering time & other actions that the browser does. Changing times and upgrades in technology have allowed this process to reach its peak. With modern applications spending more time on the browser side (because of Java-heavy frameworks) than on the server-side, it is evident that adopting real-browser testing is more than a choice, but an essential testing component.
The architecture of an application most commonly consists of three fundamental layers:
Presentation Layer (UI end)
Business Logic Layer (Application end
Database Layer (Server end
When testing the Presentation layer, the time taken for the result to display in the browser is not measured as the JavaScript, CSS, and images are hosted on the Content Delivery Network. Therefore, the response time for loading images is negligible.
However, in the case of websites where the content of the UI plays a significant role, user navigation actions are highly dependent on image load times. This is often seen in social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and on e-commerce websites like Amazon.
Let us take a closer look at a scenario where a page’s UI content is not compartmentalized. If the page includes both static and dynamic content and one of the pieces of content takes a long time to load, it affects the render time of the entire page. What if the user experiences other browser performance degradations? Therefore, to check the real-time performance of the application from an end-user perspective, we should focus on end-to-end testing using real-browsers.
Even though real-browser based testing is still a modern approach to performance testing, you need the right tools to proceed without facing any drawbacks. It requires its own CPU core and large infrastructure setups for simulating real browser instances, even with a hybrid or cloud-only environment. Aspire’s Performance Testing framework addresses all these issues with a single framework.
Aspire’s in-house performance testing framework is designed to give you realistic performance results. It uses industry-leading open-source tools and techniques to test and assess enterprise application performances. It is commonly used for testing the performance of websites (HTTP/HTTPS), web services (SOAP/REST), mobile applications and databases. Its ability to cater to end-to-end performance testing is aligned through its three-step approach:
Build & Test
Analyze & Report
Integration
Using it, enterprises have the ability to test both the server-side and client-side performances of web applications with a hybrid approach. It helps to steer clear of performance deterioration and ensure improvements when new features are added to systems.
The future of performance testing is now with real-browser as the driving force. And in its latest upgrade, Aspire’s all-in-one framework APTf 2.0 gives enterprises the opportunity to conduct browser-based testing without the need for additional investments. It allows users to simulate real-world scenarios and measure outcomes to ensure any uncalled situations such as overloads or response time among others are managed.
Some of APTf 2.0’s key features include:
Load Test with Real Browsers - Use real-browsers without the need for additional tools to understand end-user interaction
Zero Cost - An all-inclusive framework to keep control of costs
Wide Range of Protocol Support - This includes HTTP/HTTPS, SOAP/REST, FTP, MQ’s, TCP, Database, etc
Live Metrics & Interactive Reports - Tracks test results from the start of the cycle with interactive dashboards and raise alerts if any discrepancies aris
Simulate Real-World Conditions - Mimic common scenarios to avoid unexpected situation
Scalable Load - Scale up the load based on your testing requirements
Integrated App Monitoring - A holistic view of application performance
Continuous Test Within CI/CD - Integration with CI tools to keep improving applications
One of the major features of the APTf includes its approach of conducting performance tests both on the server-side and client-side. By tracking the two ends of the spectrum, it seeks to ensure high-quality performance. They include:
Server-side performance testing – In this approach, server behavior checks are done under specific loads with HTTP-based load simulation using cost-free load testing tools
Client-side performance testing – To calculate browser page navigation response time, functional test codes are used along with real-browser load simulation
In the case of multiple test cycles, functional tests can be reused for performance data
It helps in recording data including industry-standard front-end performance metrics like Time to First Byte, DOM Interactive Time, DOM Content Loaded Time, Page Load Time, First Paint, etc.
To make certain that the application faces no issues across systems, it allows testing using different browsers and the extensive list of versions that are currently used in the market
Continuous Integration: To verify new builds with additional features to keep enhancing product quality and customer satisfaction
Live monitoring: Track test results during the execution of the performance testing cycle
Server Health Monitoring:Keep a watchful eye on the health of all relevant servers during all stage of test execution
Effective Reporting:
Comparison checks with previous/archived test results for trend analysis across builds/phases/releases in the agile world
Simple reports that allow both technical and non-technical people to understand metrics
In-depth report and raw data access to analyze and diagnose bottlenecks
SLA:Automated analysis against defined SLAs
Network Throttling: To confirm if performance is always 100% at any internet speed
Keep a track of completed test cycles with email notifications that comprise a test summary
Why wait to kickstart performance testing for your enterprise?
The roadmap to success begins with APTf 2.0.
©1996- Aspire Systems