How to Prepare Your Website for Peak Traffic

Traditional, inside-the-firewall testing tools remain popular with Q&A and testing professionals. Unfortunately, these tools are built around an antiquated philosophy of generating load and measuring performance behind the firewall. This kind of internal testing only tells testers part of the story, because it only identifies problems rooted in a data center. Your end users don't live in data centers, of course. They’re located around the world, at the end of a long and complex web application delivery chain.

The key to load testing today’s modern websites and applications is to measure from the perspective of end users at the internet’s core and at its edges. Both are meaningful vantage points for understanding the true end user experience, and not just a lesser proxy of that experience. A winning approach is to apply load from the cloud along with load generated from real end users’ desktops and devices around the world.

With this combined approach, organizations can more accurately identify which end user segments are likely to experience a bottom line-risking performance degradation. With a more appropriate end user-oriented testing approach, IT professionals can more quickly identify, isolate and resolve application issues and provide better value to their organizations. Bring on the crowds!

Matthew Poepsel is vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. Reach Mathew at mpoepsel@gomez.com.