Load Testing Intranet Applications
Finding Hidden Bottlenecks
By Jeff Straathof
Just as telephone lines used to get tied up on Mother's Day, Web sites are prone to traffic overload. According to the February 14, 1996, issue of USA Today, thousands of users per second were turned away from IBM's Web site during the chess competition between Gary Kasparov and Big Blue's chess-playing computer. Another example of a high-profile cyberevent that left Web surfers high and dry was the 1996 Super Bowl Web site, which turned away millions of would-be users.
Web-server bandwidth is a problem not only for Internet Web sites, but also for corporate intranets, which often function as the backbone of a company's operations. A recent report from Zona Research (Redwood City, CA) makes some startling predictions about the growth of the intranet marketplace: By the end of 1998, the $8 billion revenue generated by the intranet market will be almost four times that of the Internet.
Businesses everywhere are launching internal applications on the World Wide Web, using it as a channel to reach scores of employees in moments, and these applications must have quality, performance, and scalability. Test engineers must measure how fast Web-system components work together, so they can determine what kind of workload their Web servers can withstand: how many simultaneous hits the Web site can handle, and how this affects quality and performance.
Load Testing
A load test emulates user activity and analyzes the effect of the real-world user environment on an application.
