Selected User Forum Posts

Beginning in mid-2010 we have directed all technical support questions to the eValid User Forum. We have learned that when one user has an issue, all users can profit from the answer.

Here is an additional selection of some of the posts that we think would be of general interest.

• In your PageMap display, how often is the data updated? -- How PageMap works with dynamic pages.
• When To Use Which Special Recording Modes -- eValid's alternative test recording modes.
• Geometric Testing -- All about building super-durable tests.
• 64-bit Machine -- Operational status of 64-bit architectures.
• "Safety factor" for AJAX script playbacks -- A critical factor for monitoring applications.

Selected User Forum Posts

• eValid Script Language -- eValid's command language is simple, clear and easy to use.
• Why doesn't eValid have graphs of hit counts? -- Hit counts are for HTTP/S. evalid measure browser events.
• How many simultaneous monitors do you recommend running? -- Performance and capacity estimates from real-world testing.
• Give me the main reaons I should buy the evalid suite? -- The short answer: It just works!
• The "Special Recording Modes" -- The simplest recording method is usually the best.

An Interesting Scalability Result

As our BLOG readers may know, we have been working recently with developing better understanding of the scalability of the eValid solution. "Scalability," simply put, describes the degree to which the solution can be ramped up to provide for large numbers of Browser Users (BUs) to drive load into a server stack.

Using a single user on a modest Windows machine, we regularly achieve 100 BUs in parallel. Using multiple users and a fairly large cloud-based machine image we have hit 10,000 BUs.

But a different way of doing things, which involves having one parent eValid BU launch multiple sub-windows, seems to be capable of besting even these very good scalability numbers. The advantage of using sub-windows is that each one takes far less memory footprint than a complete browser instance. But a disadvantage is that all of the sub-windows can't be active at the same time; so this solution only works when the tests you're running have a low-enough duty cycle (percentage of time active) so that cumulatively they don't exceed 100% of the main browser's time-line.

Within those constraints, however, this approach does appear to work quite well. Here is a screen shot of a typical Windows desktop with a total of 50 eValid browsers, each running 10 sub-windows, for a total of 500 + 50 separate activities: 550 Browser Screen Desktop Image. (Look closely at the bottom of the images and you'll see the 550 browser + window count.)

Isn't one picture worth at least 550 words?

Selected User Forum Posts

Beginning in mid-2010 we have directed all technical support questions to the eValid User Forum. We have learned that when one user has an issue, all users can profit from the answer.

Here is an additional selection of some of the posts that we think would be of general interest.

• User-perspective Usability Testing -- Alternative uses for evalid technololgy.
• Compare the work of making a recording and then scripting -- Recording from life and then hand modifying is much less work.
• Does evalid have a way to measure inside the broswer user? -- The art of partial test timing data collection.
• Local Database -- The SQL feature helps get test details for monitoring.
• User Experience Measurement -- Applying the SaveRecord command.

Update on Results From A Small Experiment

Previous BLOG items described a small experiment aimed at demonstrating how eValid can test the performance delivered to a particular smartphone. You can read about that experiment in detail in our Mobile Agent Loading Experiment #1 writeup.

To see if there had been any changes as the result of our experiment we reran the same test on the same application approximately 3 weeks after the first run. We're pleased report that improvements to that application's server stack has apparently resulted in a a 50% improvement in performance and capacity. You can see the relative improvement in the two charts shown in this Comparative Improvement of Performance.