As holiday season winds down, we can reflect on the reverse load test that we did to make sure our customers could prepare for their own holiday traffic. What’s a reverse load test? OK, it's a term we just made up. But it started like any load test, with two systems: the load generator and the system under test (SUT). The focus of our test, however, was inverted. In normal load tests, testers really care only about how the SUT performs—that’s the point of the test.

At k6, we get frequent requests to compare k6 vs. LoadRunner, and since I am an experienced user with LoadRunner (even certified), I will try to put both tools head to head. But comparing these tools is difficult as their components do not match 1:1. Each is a robust ecosystem with different parts, some doing multiple things that make straight comparisons more complicated. And on top of that, we constantly get new features that match up with many other components.

This post explains how to get started with xk6-browser, a k6 extension that adds browser-level APIs to interact with browsers and collect web performance metrics as part of your k6 tests.

Loadero supports three feature-rich test frameworks: Javascript + Nightwatch Java + TestUI, Python + Py-TestUI, but to expand the functionality further, we also develop custom commands for more insightful performance and load testing. One of the recent additions to the custom commands to use in your Loadero test scripts is the timeExecution() command.

If you’ve worked with load testing before, you know that there are a lot of things to consider. Whether or not you should combine load testing and mocks is one of those considerations. Getting to the answer requires knowledge of your infrastructure and your development procedures, which will all influence what questions you need to ask yourself.

Here are some easy steps to follow in order to sucessfully do a load testing session for your newly created website.

The best time to load test your website is when you are in the development phase. This will allow you to identify potential issues before the application is released to the public.