Analyzing the Results of Your Load Testing Reports

Luckily, improvements in graphics and user interfaces in load testing tools like LoadNinja have made interpreting data much easier—if you know what to look for.

After you're done with actually load testing your application, and have improved your tests with our Load Testing Do's and Don'ts - well, you'll have to analyze your results. Here’s a list of the most important results to look at in your load tests and how you should be working with them.

Page Load Time

You absolutely want to know the average page load time for each page in your scenario. You might have a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) that mandates how quickly pages must load, or may just want to know what this number is. It is also important to know if one page takes longer than others to load—this indicates a bottleneck in your application.

Response Load Time

Just knowing page load time, is not enough. If a page is slow, you need to know why. Being able to look at average response times for each response really gives you a detailed look into where the time is being spent. Once you've run your load tests, you can continuously integrate them with a monitoring tools.

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Errors and Warning

You need to know what errors and warnings were generated and at what level of load. This is especially important information to see in chart format. It is important to see which errors and warnings are generated and be able to see how that changes as load increases. A common error at high levels of load is “Server Error 500’s.”

Request and Response Throughput

It’s important to see the amount of data going to and coming from the tested system. This is especially important in a case where load is increasing, but bandwidth reaches and maintains a plateau. In this case, it becomes apparent that bandwidth is being throttled at some point in the process, possibly at the firewall, and often this can be fixed by changing a setting.

Hosts

Because so many of today’s websites call out to a plethora of additional hosts for things like content delivery networks, ad servers, analytics servers, social media and syndicated content, it is important for these sites to be enumerated in your reports. It’s equally important to be able to view all of the calls to a particular host. If a host is called from your pages, the response time for those requests will add to the time it takes your pages to render. You must be aware of and possibly take action in the case where a certain call takes a long period of time to respond.

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