Load Testing — When and Why
Last week, a well known Instagram Fitness-Nutrition Coach Sasha Barboza announced through her Instagram Stories that she will be releasing her anti-cellulite guide in her in her web-page store. As of today, she has 2.4 million followers in Instagram and around 700k YouTube subscribers.
One day before the release she shared that she was nervous about the technology and that she hopped that everything will go smoothly with the release of her guide. Later she shared that she was able to purchase a guide with her credit card and she felt better now.
I thought “woman you are being too optimistic, the load is going to be a problem”. And it was.
The day of the launch, couple of hours after announcing that her guide was finally up in the site using her Instagram Stories, she announced that she and her team was aware of the current problem: not everyone was being able to buy the guide. Then other problem emerged, the plugin to generate the watermark to avoid illegal reproduction, was not working as expected.
I have no knowledge of the infrastructure and/or process behind her page. But I knew that just testing that you are able to purchase when exposing your page to 2.4 million users. These are some key points about e-commerce retail that I have learned over the years.
Why to do a Load Test
We can think of load test as a controlled experiment to answer “will my web page will handle ______ simultaneous requests?”.
Some brands, specially big brands, rely on the trust relationship they have with customers. This is why it is extremely important to be able to process all requests for all the users.
Do a load test when it is important to handle all the estimated requests.
When to do a Load Test
In retail you are able to determine an average load for a regular day, usually using some analytics tool that provides this type of metrics. But there are events, called peaks, that the load goes beyond the average.
One type of event is a period of time that increases traffic. There are certain periods that are pretty common for most B2C retailers, like black Friday, and peak periods that varies accordingly to the product or brand(jewelry has a big peak during valentine’s day while other types of products might not).
The second type of event are the launch of highly publicized products. Launching a new product will make the load of a page go up. This traffic will not be constant after a certain period when average load returns.
Do a load test in preparation for a peak.
Is it needed every time?
No. After several peaks it will be clear what are the required enhancements to support certain amount of load.
However, if the infrastructure changes or there is a new estimated that will go above record, then a new load tests is highly recommended.
