Pushing website performance to the limit ...

SciVisum Load Testing Service gives you access to expert testers with specialist knowledge to spot problems quickly and provide insights into the root causes of problems. SciVisum’s Load Testing Service offers guaranteed expansive and complex Website Capacity Testing sessions often unobtainable from in-house self-servicing due to departmental time constraints.

Key Features

• Utilize SciVisum’s high quality hardware and resources
• Inclusion of client web analytics and infrastructure data into test definitions.
• Use of results from multiple data sources to devise problem specific tests as a complement to the known mix of user journeys under investigation.
• Benchmarking of current performance with 24/7 monitoring of the pre-existing User Journeys prior to testing.
• Obtain SciVisum’s specialist knowledge and proficiency for active results
• Access to the experience of expert testers to spot problems quickly
• Guaranteed expansive and complex testing sessions often unobtainable from self-servicing due to departmental time constraints
• An individual, clear analytical report, meaningful to all departments of the business team
• Post testing workshops and reviews with SciVisum experts.

Greater accuracy through real world conditions

SV-Load tests your website by performing tasks as real users would - rather than simply hitting isolated pages. We provide a number of test variations to replicate real world conditions including:

Modelling ‘drop off ratios’ (the ratio of users that drop out during a journey) rather than testing loads where 100% of users starting a Journey follow it through to the end.

Testing a mixture of Dynamic User Journeys in line with expected load ratios such as 20% checkouts, 30% add to baskets, 40% product searches and so on.

Checking that page content is as expected and that the link required to move to the next step in the Journey is functioning - rather than simply checking page headers.

Identify bottlenecks & root causes

A complex test sequence helps uncover route causes that are otherwise difficult to find. For example high simultaneity runs simulate many virtual users following
a journey and then stopping before hitting a defined page concurrently. These tests identify a range of race conditions - software coding problems that cause a percent of users to see error pages, but don’t typically show in UAT testing.

Reality Based Metrics

The flexibility and multi functionality of sites can make load testing more challenging for organisations determined to ensure that all different types of users and usage patterns have been understood and optimised.

Session lengths, the weight of pages and the speed of processes involved and load for these various kinds of journeys and the systems they run on will most likely differ greatly. In addition to that the proportion of the journey types will likely change at different times of the day or periods of the year.

For an effective load test it is important to cover not only a mixture of different journeys, but to weight the number of each type of journey within the test by the proportional breakdown of those journeys in different time periods, reflecting the ways the site must be able to handle different kinds of traffic peaks.

Quickly resolve problems with expert advice

Our engineers deliver more than a set of numbers, they spend time understanding your needs and requirements beforehand and provide bespoke insights into root
causes, adjusting the test plan as needed during testing, and ensure that your tech team will have actionable results. This helps resolve problems quickly and often provides large performance gains for minimal investment, as minor improvements to web application architecture or coding often deliver more substantial gains than expensive hardware upgrades.

Bridge the gap between Business & Technology teams

Companies are usually dismayed and surprised when a marketing campaign does not produce the online results expected – one contributing factor could be that your website is unable to handle the volume of traffic expected. Don’t lose sales, ensure that your site is ready for your online marketing campaigns.

User Journey load testing provides hard facts about your website’s ability to support traffic and can be easily interpreted by all departments - protecting technical departments from blame when results don’t meet expectations.

Testing To The Limits.

As eCommerce continues to rise in strategic importance the data available from simpler, traditional, load testing that concentrates on basic metrics such as concurrent user sessions, page views, or technology driven performance measures alone is no longer able to provide the level of insight needed.

The SciVisum approach allows our testing clients to ramp up the traffic to test the performance of the site to match forecasted traffic peaks of future sales. This subsequently means our clients can report back to the business teams, or even the board, with genuine confidence that the sites tested will not be restricted by ‘technical issues’ at peak, only by the level of traffic marketing campaigns are able to generate and present to the platform.

Keeping It Real

If you already know that your websites don’t just have one kind of user, always taking the same path through the same site, in the same numbers, taking the same amount of time, then what can load testing that way tell you?

SciVisum’s approach to testing is to reflect as close to a real-life scenario as possible. This is done through building a realistic set of user journeys, often with complex bespoke weighting calculations, that are based on the latest site usage information.  Take a Do What the Customer Does approach to defining yur Load Test User Jurneys

The results possible with such a representative approach are much more precise than those achievable with traditional load testing.

More Information

What Happens in a Load Test

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