Great Ideas and Great Offers for Tough Times

It is genuinely "tough times" right now — we're sure this applies to everyone! So to do our part to help our customers get over the hump we have put together some ideas for big savings and hugh productivity gains:

• Get a big payoff with eValid based PerformanceTest™ server loading services: you can beat the $1 browser-hour barrier. (A browser-hour is one browser applying a test continuously for one hour.) In fact, in some cases you can even lower your costs below 25¢ per browser-hour. Choose the level of load you need from five scaled options. There's sure to be one to fit your budget.
• Here's the PerformanceTest Press Release on the new service option.
• If you purchase a PerformanceTest™ project you can take 33% off all eValid licenses requested in the same order.
• Here's how we produce rapid increases in applied load: Illustration of Step Function In Server Loading. This approach give you the ability to control 100's to 1,000's of eValid browsers located anywhere.

Check our website for upcoming special eValid offers! We're on your side!

Selected Forum Items & Blog Items

Here is a selection of interesting recent queries and responses in the eValid User Forum: or in the eValid BLOG:

• Application Mode Explained (Regression Testing)
• Right Page with Right Test? (Synchronization Issues)
• Dynamic Access to sourceIndex and elementValue values (DOM Processing)
• Capacity Issues (Application Monitoring)
• LoadTest Run (Server Loading)

We invite eValid users to create an account on the eValid User Forum and post queries or responses.

Recent and Upcoming Conferences & Technical Community Events

Here are pointers to interesting recent and upcoming technical conferences that should be of interest:

• Information and Software Technology Special Issue on Mutation Testing, papers due 30 October 2009.
• AQuSerM: Advances in Quality of Service Management, EDOC 2009 Workshop, 31 August - 4 September 2009, Aukland, New Zealand.
• International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis: ISSTA 2009, 19-23 July 2009, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
• IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification & Validation (ICST 2010), 6-9 April, 2010, Paris, France, EU.
• 5th European Symposium on Verification and Validation of Software Systems (VVSS 2009), 11 June 2009, Eindhoven, Netherlands, EU.

These events deserve careful consideration, so please take a look at each of them!

Simple AJAX Synchronization Example

There has been a great deal of discussion lately about using eValid to run tests on AJAX applications where the behavior of a test may be affected by how fast the server-side part of an AJAX-based page performs.

These are always complicated scripts, but we came up with a very simple example that seems to make all of the points.

In "MooTools" AJAX Synchronization Example the simple trick we use to illustrate how simple Sync-on-Text synchronization works is to play the script back with all of the natural delays (what was recorded "from life") multiplied by 0.0.

The resulting script "plays ahead" of the AJAX example -- an autocompleter function done with the MooTools kit -- until you add a SyncOnText command. After that, even with the delays all at zero seconds the script plays back fully synchronized.

eVlite Statistics Updated

Users of the LoadTest features in the eValid suite of tools may already be familiar with the fact that eValid Loadtest runs can involve a number of full-reality Emulated Users (EUs) but also can incorporate HTTP-based activity generators that work like Virtual Users (VUs).

When you want ultra-realistic emulation of actual user activity then you have to use EUs, but in parallel with that many LoadTest runs also involve using a number of VUs -- using an included eValid utility called eVlite.

We have updated the eVlite Limited Fidelity Playback Option Performance Estimates based on recent experiments.

That page includes a table that shows how many VUs an instance of eVlite can generate, and the total number of VUs that appear to be possible on a realtively modest machine.

The numbers show that you can have, on one machine, upwards of 30,000 VUs if you REALLY want to impose a heavy work load on your server. In practice, experienced load test and performance engineers generally choose to have a mix betwen EUs and VUs -- a ratio of about 100:1 seems to be a good mix -- to produce load testing scenarios that are as realistic as possible.

Monitoring Performance Benchmarks

When you run a functional test in "monitoring mode" you typically report the test results to a network reporting system (e.g. Nagios, or GroundWork, or Hyperic, or Zenoss, or some other similar system). One of the questions we often get after the reporting integration is done is this: "How many tests CAN you run with eValid on one machine per hour?"

We just heard from one of our customers who is using eValid on four agent machines, and he reports that the aggregate effect of his four agent machines is over 1,800,000 tests per month.

This works out to about 625 eValid playbacks per machine per hour, every hour, 24x7x30 -- every day of the month.

Clearly he has to use multiple instances of eValid on each agent machine to get this kind of result. Given that the typical test he runs takes one or two minutes, this particular installation achieves a parallelism of about 10:1 or more on a continuing basis.

The CPU utiliztion of each of these agent machines -- and our customer says that they are very hot CPUs with a lot of RAM -- runs about 40% on the average. It would probably be imprudent to try to run these with any closer safety margin.

Webinar: Functional Testing of AJAX Applications

Test Complex Applications -- Including AJAX -- Simply and Reliably
Run Regression Tests, Monitoring Tests, and Server Loading Tests

Thursday, 21 May 2009 — 2:00 PM Eastern Time / 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Outline: Automation with AJAX is all around us: in banking, airline reservations, online shopping. More machines, and fewer human agents. Hence, we need to automate testing and monitoring these sophisticated applications.

Fortunately technologies like eValid provide you with the peace of mind that your Internet Presence is stable and that every customer who uses your web application will be well served. Even if your web application uses AJAX – as do many of the newest web apps – you can still get 100% realistic and reliable tests that confirm reliable operation.

This webinar shows how the eValid functional test engine can record AJAX application tests quickly, and then use them for functional/regression testing, availability monitoring, and server loading.

Speaker: Edward Miller, eValid's Chief Architect, will discuss key aspects of use of eValid as a test engine for complex AJAX applications:

* How to use eValid effectively and efficiently.
* What makes an application AJAX? What does AJAX really mean?
* Manual vs. automated sync: Why wait times are not reliable?
* How to sync on text in a page.
* How to sync on internal DOM properties.
* How to validate dynamic pages.
* Recommendations for usage in regression, monitoring, and loading contexts.

Moderator: Rita Bral, VP/Communications of Software Research, will act as moderator for the webinar, drawing upon her years of experience as a communicator (Rita speaks five languages), and her background as an event organizer.

WEB: www.e-valid.com
BLOG: e-valid.blogspot.com
USER FORUM: forum.e-valid.com

eValid Division
Software Research, Inc.
1663 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103 USA

Tel: +1 (415) 861-2800

FAX: +1 (415) 861-9801