The Business View

Many websites today have a serious business mission—to make money. And whether that’s through providing custom content and proprietary services, through advertising opportunities or by selling retail products, these high-traffic websites and applications need to be up and running at all times. Because if performance slows even a little, fickle web users are likely to jump quickly to a competitor’s site.

The message to website owners is clear: Test and monitor your website!

Few websites, if any, perform exhaustive testing. Usually focused solely on catching bugs, many websites ignore functionality testing, usability testing and performance testing—three critical elements in defining the user experience with a website or web application. In short, webmasters and developers should not only test for bugs, test whether the website does what it is meant to do (functionality testing) and test whether the user is able to easily accomplish tasks and objectives on the website (usability testing), but they must also test whether the user gets results from the website in an acceptable time (performance testing).

Performance testing is a critical component of your website or web application’s overall success. From a performance standpoint, your goal isto ensure that your end-user’s or customer’s mouse click is not met with silence. Optimize your webserver so that that 95% of all web requests are processed in less than 10 seconds.

Jakob Nielsen^[1], one of the foremost experts on software and website usability  suggests the following performance thresholds for your website and or web application:

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Webserver Stress Tool allows you quickly ascertain and identify performance problems so that you can quickly correct them to prevent user dissatisfaction and potential loss of revenue.

Through an intuitive interface, flexible testing parameters, and comprehensive reporting, Webserver Stress Tool provides you the tool to include performance testing as a regular part of website and web application maintenance and deployment.

Once your webserver has been deployed with the correct configurations (based upon performance testing), you may also consider deploying a 24/7 monitoring application. Paessler’s IPCheck Server Monitor (http://www.paessler.com) can help you keep a constant, vigil eye on your investment in web architecture technology.