What is web load testing?

Web pages are accessible worldwide, not all web pages are equal. Some pages have lots of dynamic web content and they require a lot of external API calls. This would mean that the web page is not just limited by how quickly the requests are processed on its own machines. It is also affected by external payment processors, external APIs are so on. There are several techniques to idenfity, queue, isolate and maintain such dependencies on a web page. Load testing identifies the following for a web application:

- Peak capacity for a web application
- Assess the hardware and software limits
- Work out peak concurrent users on a platform
- Sustained duration of page load
- Stress tests are different from load tests

All of the above should help web developers and business owners assess the performance. We have experienced scaling & load issues with football matches, TV coverage, Techcrunch & news media releases, etc. There are other techniques like Auto-scaling which grows the server infrastructure to match the web page loads. However all of them will have some limits as mentioned above. The idea of load testing is to work out a maximum load on the web page and assess if the infrastructrue can support that required load.

Featured web applications

Click on one of our projects below to view a detailed case study

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  eBay multi-sided platform

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  Online Event Marketplace

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  A bespoke Web Application

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  Web application in a router

Advantages & Disadvantages of Load testing

The main advantages of load testing are:

- Reducing the impact of failure
- Customer satisfaction
- Identify third party API constraints
- Clear out bottlenecks of perfomance issues

The disadvantages of load testing are:

- Expensive tools
- Increased bandwidth & server costs
- Requires on-going testing on each major release

Not all web projects warrant a load test. There are also external caching services like CloudFlare that can mitigate load on large websites. Also in certain cases marketing campaigns can be co-ordinated to ensure the developers are ready for traffic.

About Webdigi & Services

We are a web development company in London. We specialise in developing bespoke web applications & unique web platforms. Over the years we have helped clients build great web applications. From time to time we publish open source tools, projects and articles like this to raise awareness and contribute back to the open source community that we rely on so much!