Oct, 2001 : Keynote Releases List of Tips for Holiday Load-Bearing

📅 October 18, 2001 - The "Top 10 Tips for Load Testing your Web site for the Holidays" were announced yesterday by Keynote Systems (keynote.com). Americans are expected to stay closer to home this holiday season resulting in an increase over last year in online holiday shopping. Businesses must be ready for the increase in traffic and load testing is the way to prepare in order to ensure that Web sites don't crumble under the stress.

Here are Keynote's top 10 tips for the season:
1. Test early and test often: Always plan ahead to make sure your site canhandle major site launches, seasonal promotions and marketing initiatives.However, don't ignore day-to-day content changes and modifications to yourWeb site. What may appear as a minor change to your Web site can negativelyimpact your Web site's performance and availability.
2. Be realistic: If the load generated on your Web site during your loadtest is not realistic, the results are at best useless and, at worst,dangerously misleading. Make sure your load test uses a real-worldmethodology that accurately reflects the rate and pattern that your visitorsarrive and leave your Web site.
3. Know your Web site visitors: Not all your Web site visitors are alike.Your load test should account for different types of visitor behavior onyour Web site. For example, visitors trying to execute a stock transactionwill have very different tolerance and tenacity thresholds than will a usertrying to view a weather update. Your load test should accommodate variableonline behaviors for different types of actions on your Web site.
4. Test scenarios as dynamic as your visitors: Your visitors can interactwith your Web site in a variety of ways. They can often navigate through amultitude of different paths to get to the same end-point or enter a varietyof different data inputs to generate dynamic content. Make sure that yourWeb site can accommodate these dynamic patterns without tedious, hard-codingof test scripts and huge resource time commitments.
5. Understand the cost of poor Web site performance: Suppose you know thatyour Web site is performing on average 5 seconds slower than it was a monthbefore. What conclusions can you draw? How many users abandoned your sitedue to poor performance? At what point did they abandon the site? How muchpotential revenue was lost as a result? Choose a load testing solution thatcan quantify the business implications of your Web site's performance.
6. Schedule regular Web site health check-ups: If you only load test yoursite during high-volume periods such as Christmas or Valentine's Day, youmay be losing loyal customers to your competitors during the remainder ofthe year. The key to a high-performing Web site involves more than justrunning a pre-deployment load test, but also performing periodic teststhroughout the lifespan of your Web site.
7. Simplify testing: Simplify the administration of your load tests. Yourbusiness environment is dynamic - often necessitating last minute changes toyour Web site. A self-service hosted solution will give you the flexibilityto schedule your tests at a moment's notice and to change test scenarios onthe fly. With the insurance of a self-service load test, you won't have toworry how even the most minor changes will impact your users.
8. Stop the finger-pointing: Eliminate "It's not my fault" accusationswithin your organization. By accurately pinpointing the cause of theperformance degradation or capacity bottleneck, you can quickly identify thesource of the problem and remedy the issue before it negatively affects yourvalued customers.
9. Respond to constant change: Changes within organizations are oftenunpredictable and difficult to plan. A last minute change to yourinfrastructure such as an application upgrade, network configuration change,load balancer setting or database modification can cause performancevariations. Prepare your Web site by testing these Web site changes with afull-service, turnkey load test and a flexible, self-service testingsolution.
10. Spend your IT budget wisely: Don't assume that a high-performing Website requires endless investments in systems and bandwidth. Addingadditional servers and bandwidth isn't a foolproof solution to fixingperformance problems on your Web site. Only invest in additionalinfrastructure when your tests definitively point to capacity bottlenecks asthe problem. Your load test should be able to help you accurately isolatethe true cause of the performance issue.
To help e-businesses assure a high quality experience for their customersduring this season and beyond, Keynote also announced Keynote LoadSuite, aservice bundle that effectively packages together Keynote's two performancetesting services: KeyReadiness LoadPro and Test Perspective.