Mercury Interactive's Loadtest 3.0

By Mike Oliveira, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

So, you finally got your small business online. Your Web site has been designed, you have the perfect Internet address, your new business cards include your e-mail address. 

You're all set to become the next huge dot.com. But once your customers start flocking to your Web site, will it be able to handle the traffic? 

Mercury Interactive's Astra LoadTest can answer that question by testing how your Web site will respond when bombarded with visitors. Achieving a strong Internet presence may take time -- but do you want to have customers turned away if your Web site becomes the next Amazon.com and you're not prepared? 

LoadTest simulates traffic on your Web site and gauges how it reacts to the traffic. Through the use of virtual users, LoadTest allows you to determine how many visitors can access your site and how frequently they can access it. 

Just program LoadTest to log on to your Web site, head to a search page, select a few parameters and run the query to simulate a predetermined number of simultaneous virtual users. After walking LoadTest through your Web site with a few clicks, you can determine how long users must wait for certain pages, how long a search takes and locate bottlenecks. 

Tests can be made more elaborate by customizing the number of virtual users, how fast they travel through the site and what a virtual user searches, along with many more options. LoadTest can randomize the speed that virtual users flow through the site to simulate slow and fast readers.

While the test is being recorded, you can view the results as they come in, watch one or several virtual users, or wait for detailed reports to be compiled at the end of the test. LoadTest will sort the results by a number of rankings, including sorting by user and by time spent on each Web page. 

The process can be intimidating, but a good tutorial is included, making it easy to learn. The quantity and detail of graphs and statistics in the documentation are outstanding, although the titles of some can be cryptic. 

LoadTest's biggest drawback is the price. At nearly $10,000 US ($14,495 Canadian) for a license that simulates 50 users, it's priced outside the budgets of some small businesses. A license that simulates 100 users costs $17,995 US ($27,000 Canadian), while a license to simulate 250 users is $29,995 US ($45,000 Canadian).

The number of virtual users simulated per machine depends on the license purchased but there is no limit on the number of installations. You can, for instance, install a 50-user license application on five computers on your network and simulate 250 users for the price of one 50-user license. 

The license you use depends on the strength of your hardware. Mercury Interactive says that a single processor machine can reasonably run about 70 virtual users on a site that uses client-side scripting, while 250 simulations per machine is appropriate for a more powerful machine with four processors. 

It's rare that a new Web site gets the kind of traffic that will take down a server overnight. For perspective, Amazon.com saw seven million visitors in one of its busiest pre-Christmas weeks in 1999. That's an average of a million a day, or about 700 a minute. Of course, an average can't speak for a specific individual day or minute. Customers flocking to a site that can handle 700 visitors a minute could still be locked out if too many log on at once.

The bottom line is that you can't grow an e-business unless you know at which point traffic will bring your server to its knees. Even if your company doesn't become the next hot initial public stock offering, your site needs to be able to handle as much growth as you anticipate and probably more. If you do become the owner of the next hot IPO, it's worth investing a few thousand dollars if the value of your stocks have quadrupled at the end of a trading day. 

Reviewer's rating: 4 / 5 

Comments: Mercury Interactive's LoadTest can test how your Web site would respond to a predetermined number of simultaneous users, and provides useful detailed reports. However, price is a major drawback. A functional, seven-day evaluation version can be downloaded from Mercury Interactive's Web site at: http://www.astratryandbuy.com 

More info: http://www.merc-int.com/products/astraloadtest.html

Minimum system requirements: Pentium 166 MHz, Windows NT 4.0, 64 MB of RAM, 35 MB of disk space, Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. 
More info: http://www.merc-int.com/products/astraloadtest.html

Prices: By license to simulate users (no limit on number of installations): 
50 users: $9,995 US, $14,495 Canadian 
100 users: $17,995 US, $27,000 Canadian
250 users: $29,995 US $45,000 Canadian