HTTP Load Tests

HTTP load testing is the primary job of LoadForge, and focuses on three main areas of testing:

• Website testing
• API testing
• Webserver testing

LoadForge excels at all three areas, and is able to test any website, web server or HTTP-based API (REST, XmlRPC, GraphQL, etc).

Website testing

To test a website you are typically really testing the dynamic aspects of a website. The front page of your shop, the login process, adding items to your cart, etc. These generate database load, dynamic backend load (PHP, etc.) and are usually the first places to break.

You will normally find your webserver is capable of responding with far more static content (images, stylesheets, etc) than dynamic pages.

With website testing you want to generally either send a large amount of traffic to your front page and monitor the breaking points on your backends, or, simulate user flows by recording your browser or scripting actions like logging in.

API testing

API load testing is very similar to web load testing except for most APIs load is all dynamic.

For that you want to test your various API requests, especially the higher throughput or higher load ones to see where your breaking points are and what your expected reply times are during peak load.

Some APIs cache certain GET requests though, so you may want to have separate high scale tests for APIs that are expected to return a large volume of responses.

Webserver testing

Webserver testing is very different from website testing in that you are trying to stress test the maximum capabilities of the webserver itself, e.g. Nginx, Apache, IIS and so on.

To do this you will want to have small, medium and large static files on the server and request those at a very high rate. This is usually a type of testing done by advanced or large use cases where you have already understood the dynamic side of your services.