What is LoadNinja?
LoadNinja is a cloud-based load testing and performance testing platform for web applications and web services. It helps developers, QA teams, and performance engineers check if their web servers sustain a massive load and if the servers are robust and scalable.
LoadNinja helps you answer the following questions:
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How many users can simultaneously work with my web application without a perceptible slowdown?
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What load can crash the server?
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How does the response time change if the load increases?
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How do hardware and software changes affect the server performance?
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And so on.
With LoadNinja, you can create both UI-based tests that simulate user actions on the tested web application, and API tests that work similarly to a client reaching the server via API.
Testing with LoadNinja
To test your web server, you can create either UI tests, or API tests, or both. See below.
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Create a UI or API test
These are “single-user” tests, each of them represent an application usage procedure like placing an order or searching a product catalog. A UI test simulates actions of one user on the tested website; an API test simulates behavior of one client application. You then run these tests multiple times to simulate massive load on the tested web application.
You record UI tests in LoadNinja’s built-in browser. Simply enter a URL and start recording! Learn more.
As for API tests, you create them manually, one request to another.
You can add validations both to UI and API tests to verify response contents and response time of the server.
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Create a load testing scenario
A scenario is the definition of your load test. A scenario combines one or more “single-user” tests, specifies the number of virtual users (VU), ramp-up load parameters, and other details.
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Run the scenario
LoadNinja runs load tests in a cloud and provisions cloud machines automatically for the test duration. To run a UI test, each virtual user uses a real browser to replay test actions, so they interact with your web application exactly as real users do, including think times and running client-side scripts.
During the run, LoadNinja displays real-time charts to help you monitor the test progress and the state of your application.
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Analyze the results
After the test has completed, LoadNinja generates a report containing performance metrics collected during the test run. This data helps you estimate your server performance and see if it meets the SLA.
Why use LoadNinja?
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Create real-life load tests that simulate real user actions. With LoadNinja, you record user actions on the tested website, then simulate the recorded transactions using hundreds or thousands of virtual users. So, every virtual user acts very similarly to a real user, that is, your load tests are close to real life, they are not just requesting one URL of a website. This is different from what some other online testing solutions offer.
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Use real browsers for real user simulation. LoadNinja plays back the recorded traffic in real browsers. Each virtual user works in their own browser, they don’t affect each other. LoadNinja simulates user actions precisely, including pauses between actions. If some tested pages run script code on the client side, that code is also executed during the test run in the browser. That is, your load test works as hundreds and thousands of real users work. This is contrary to many competitive online and desktop solutions that record and play back HTTP requests, and don’t simulate real user actions and real browser functioning.
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Create platform-independent load tests. LoadNinja is platform-independent. You can create and run tests in a browser on any computer that has Internet access.
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Create tests quickly and easily. You create UI tests by recording user actions in the built-in browser, and you create API tests in the built-in request editor. No coding, downloading, or installing browser plugins is needed.
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Take advantage of clear user actions in tests. LoadNinja records user actions in the form of understandable test commands rather than a set of hard-to-read requests and responses. You don’t have to spend your time and efforts configuring the recorded scripts to maintain the session state or to provide user-specific data. That is, no data correlation is needed.
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Scale your load tests as needed. Simulating real-life user behavior requires resources. In case of desktop solutions, you would need additional machines to run load agents. LoadNinja works in a cloud, so you don’t have to find additional “agent” computers, you don’t have to find drive space to save recorded scripts and a huge amount of accumulated test results. LoadNinja does all these automatically for you. All you need to do is to choose the desired number of virtual users to simulate.
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Record tests on popular screen resolutions. Modern web applications look slightly different on different devices and screen resolutions. With LoadNinja, you can easily create load tests that will simulate users working on most popular screen resolutions for laptops, iPads, and mobile phones.
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Watch virtual user activity at real time. LoadNinja provides connection to browsers that simulate user actions, so you can easily see the browser window and monitor how this or that virtual user is doing.
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Save on testing facility. LoadNinja is hosted on Amazon Web Services, so you don’t need your own server machine for load testing purposes.