Maybe you’re still wondering why it’s worth going through all this or all you heard is Google is considering page load time as a ranking factor for your website or that slow loading times result in less sales. While both of these are true, you need to understand the mechanisms behind it to figure out what makes website speed so important.
The part of your website’s experience affected by loading time is its usability. In more rough words said, waiting kills usability. Slower loading websites make users wait. When users wait, they don’t use your website, they’re not engaged in anything and have all the temptation to engage in something else, of course unless you’ve already captured their attention with some catchy title but that’s not what we’re discussing right now. Bottom line is this: The more seamless your website is loading the more engaged your users will be.
Load Testing is quite unique in SoapUI, we have created a functionality that allows you to create Performance Tests quickly and modify them easily. The main differentiator is that Performance Tests in SoapUI generally is created from existing Functional Tests. This allows you to very quickly create advanced Performance Tests. You can then validate a Web Service performance under different Load scenarios, maintain functional validations to see that they don’t break under load, run several load tests simultaneously to see how they affect each other and much more. Let’s move on to the tutorial. What we are going to learn is the following:
The goal of performance testing is to appraise any user experience in realistic scenarios on your target application. It will allow you to assess machine and infrastructure capability.
Performance testing, load testing, stress testing, capacity testing are all based on business requirements. It’s a professional approach to evaluating the performance of an application. It requires the simulation of real load scenarios running against your target applications or websites. So that means concurrent users.
For testing sophisticated web applications, you also need a mix of relative transactions running at correct pacings. So that’s the speed at which each of the users is running at a correctly generated load. The load must be generated conforming to a HTTP standards.
If you’re following all of those four points, then you end up with realistic load, which will then give you a fingerprint of the response time that the application will deliver. In fact it will give you the response time that you can expect and also the transaction rate that we know the application can deal with at its peak.
WebLoadUI is a tool that enables you to create website load tests. Load testing involves simulating multiple virtual users that send requests to the tested web site concurrently and evaluating the web site performance under the massive load.
Virtual users are not real users. WebLoadUI simulates recorded requests and the tested server “thinks” that it works with an actual user. Each virtual user works according to its task, or scenario. A scenario is a sequence of requests sent to the server and the server’s responses to them. In other words, the scenario emulates user actions on the tested web site.