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The Technical View

Although Webserver Stress Test 6 and performance testing in general solve key business issues such as up-time, user experience, and ROI, performance testing has a number of technical considerations to ensure that those business issues are resolved. For example, consider the following questions

·      Is your webserver prepared for the traffic you are expecting? 

·      Is your webserver prepared for increasing visitors over the months and years to come?

·      Can your webserver survive a massive spike in user traffic (e.g., if your website is mentioned on national TV or your company emails a newsletter to all customers and prospects)?

·      How many users can your web server handle before users start getting error messages or server timeouts?

·      How many seconds does it take for a visitor to your website to receive a page after clicking on a link? Under normal conditions? Under heavy conditions?

·      Does your application or shopping cart support simultaneous users?

·      Are your scripts and databases optimized  to run as quickly as possible and do they interact with each other correctly under heavy webserver loads?

·      Is the web hosting service doing a good job?

·      Is your webserver’s bandwidth sufficient?

·      Is your server hardware sufficient?

Performance testing, as a valuable aspect of maintaining and growing the web portions of your business, is about answering these questions. To do an adequate job of representing your company to the world with your website, you need to discover the answers to all of these questions!