As I have been spending the past few weeks gradually working on ways to tune and tweak my blog to improve page load times, I ran across a simple but free online stress test tool from Load Impact. This tool will run a 10, 20, 30 and 40 concurrent user load test against your website and show you the performance results under the load.
My blog had an average pageload time of 12 seconds when 1-20 simultaneous users were hitting my blog but rapidly decreased performance and was as high as 40 second load times during the 40 simultaneous user load test.
Now wordpress blogs on shared hosting tend to be slower than standard html pages, and the more plug-ins, widgets, scripts, badges and affiliate code you slap onto your site, the slower your page is going to load.
This quick free test will see if your blog can handle concurrent user loads of up to 40 users and you will find that this test alone may “bring down” your site if you are using a shared hosting plan and your blog has performance issues. It is a good benchmark to baseline you blog before you start doing tweaks, you can tweak and re-run the load test to see if your tuning has had any effect on performance.
For the casual blogger who has limited budget a free online stress test should be more than sufficient to help you find your performance and page load times and assist you with benchmarks for when you tune your blog. Obviously for companies and large corporations that host their own web servers they have specialized software for running performance monitoring and many sites can handle in the “thousands” of concurrent users per minute with dedicated hardware and load balanced web servers.
If you haven’t attempted to stress test your blog yet, I would recommend you perform a Load Impact Free Stress Test and see what numbers you come back with.
-Dragon Blogger
Related posts:
- Improve Your WordPress Blog Load Times My most excellent and helpful web hosting company Dreamhost has done the extra research of finding out why my dragonblogger.com...
- Where Has Software Quality Testing Gone? Performance stress testing applications to improve load times, find memory leaks provides stability and assurance that your software or code...
- Increasing WordPress Pageload Performance Can Backfire I tested out several wordpress cache plug-ins and they made my pageload performance worse instead of better. Test thoroughly when...
- Blogging Tips – Test All Of Your Blogs Functionality Often Bloggers, every time you upgrade a plug-in or wordpress version you should try and make a point to test out...
- Improve Your Blog Experience on Mobile Phones With the Mobile Plugin for Wordpress you can make sure your blog loads fast and efficiently on mobile devices which...
| via FaceBook, Twitter, RSS or Email |  |
Enter your email and subscribe now!
Tags: blog load test, blog pageload times, blog performance, blog stress test, blog testing, blogging tips, free load tests, free performance tests, free stress test, load impact, load test your blog, loadimpact, test blog performance, test page load, testing wordpress, testing your blog, tuning your blog, wordpress, wordpress load test, wordpress performance tips, wordpress performance tuning, wordpress testing, wordpress tuning
December 9th, 2009 at 11:58 am
So what is the name of the stress-test? Could you provide a link? Name?
Florida SEO´s last blog ..How To: Dominate Local SEO
[Reply]
December 10th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Link and name are including in the post, just go to the site, enter URL and click “Start Test”
[Reply]
December 14th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Don’t think I’m gonna need this as my blog has been tested “live” by real crazy visitors in a day lol
But it’s always good to prepare
Michael Aulia @Technology and Reviews´s last blog ..Razer Imperator Unboxings
[Reply]
December 15th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Did you install WP-Super-Cache during the test? I got 30.1s delay on 50 clients test.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
[Reply]