PERFORMANCE TESTING TOOL FOR E-COMMERCE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The performance of an E-commerce application relies on various aspects. Apart from the quality of the E-commerce application itself, the factors which determine the performance of an E-commerce appplication are, system configuration, client configuration, network configuration, system load and database load. Performance testing of E-commerce applications is the discipline concerned with determining and reporting the current performance of an E-commerce application under various parameters. Performance testing covers various types of testing to provide information on the quality of the E-commerce application under test with regard to speed, scalability and stability characteristics. This research focuses only on the load testing of web servers which host E-commerce applications, mainly due to time and resource limitations. A study was done on existing web load test tools and OpenWebLoad was found suitable for this research because of its simplicity and also because it is an open source tool and it is free. Some simple forms were developed to set the test parameters and run the test. Additional features such as viewing of log information of tests and comparing the web servers which has been tested has been incorporated into OpenWebLoad. The new comparison feature of the tool would enable a developer to do a simple and straight forward real time load test on the web servers which is to host their E-commerce applications. A simulation of the real-life use of an E-commerce application is performed to assess how the application will work under actual conditions of use. The result of the test shows the amount of requests, response time and transactions per second of the web servers under various loads. As this is only a prototype tool, the scalability results of only two web servers can be compared.