New Web Load Testing Service
You can never have too much stats, right? Today I came across a new load testing site that might provide you with some interesting data points. LoadImpact.com simulates multiple users accessing a website and presents a simple report on how long the server took to respond. Here’s an example report :
You can run the basic test without registering, or you can sign up for a free account and get a few (very few) additional features. There are also commercial “account levels” available but they’re way too expensive for ordinary mortals/hobbyist bloggers. However, if you have a company that actually needs load testing for their servers, Load Impact might be an interesting option.
Personally, I’m just using the free version to feed my desire to procrastinate in semi-meaningful ways 😉
On a related note, Pingdom Tools is also good. It’s an entirely free service that measures how long it takes to load all the components of a given webpage (e.g. images, scripts and CSS). This can be very useful when you’re trying to optimize your site/theme to load faster.
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Came across your blog while searching for facebook apps and spent more than a hour here. Your no BS no fluff blog is impressive and you have a bloggie(should rhyme with groupie) here.
Well, that’s slightly surprising, considering how my posts are all over the place (in terms of topics discussed). Thanks 🙂
Hmm… I used Firebug’s NET monitor to see how much time and KBs I spent for my homepage loading session.
Firebug is handy, but the results are subjective because they depend on your connection speed.
I have used LoadImpact to test our website and it was very efficient. I used the paid service to be able to ramp up the user acount over 50.
We were looking for tools to load test the website and when we came across loadimpact we gave the free trial a go and it worked a charm.
Later on we paid for the server and ran the tests. It’s great to be able to test your live environment before you do any large PR campaigns etc, and it’s cheaper to pay for the one time use rather than purchasing a tool (however, in the long run it would probably be expensive to keep using LoadImpact).
I had some issues with the tool at first but they have a support forum (I think they are quite new) and when I emailed them about my issue they actually gave me an aditional days usage and that’s good service!