Case Study
AVG Technologies standardized their load testing on WebLOAD
Overview
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands AVG Technologies provides antivirus software and internet security services. AVG Technologies is best known for its AVG Antivirus product. Over 200 million active users
used AVG’s software products and services, which include internet security, performance optimization and personal privacy and identity protection applications.
Challenge
Considering the popularity of its AVG Antivirus and the volume of traffic and downloads on its website, AVG cannot afford a slow performing website.
Critical web pages affecting revenue are therefore tested on an ongoing basis for performance.
“We have a dedicated load testing environment which simulates the production environment, and we design load tests based on actual production logs, to ensure we run realistic simulations” says Tomas Mica, Test Automation Engineer at AVG.
In addition to recurrent performance tests, AVG Technologies runs ad-hoc ‘Proof of Concept’ Tests. “We typically run performance testing and ramp-up tests for new projects at their proof of concept stage and compare the results with our existing solutions.”
Critical web pages affecting revenue are therefore tested on an ongoing basis for performance.
“We have a dedicated load testing environment which simulates the production environment, and we design load tests based on actual production logs, to ensure we run realistic simulations” says Tomas Mica, Test Automation Engineer at AVG.
In addition to recurrent performance tests, AVG Technologies runs ad-hoc ‘Proof of Concept’ Tests. “We typically run performance testing and ramp-up tests for new projects at their proof of concept stage and compare the results with our existing solutions.”
Solution
AVG Technologies standardized their load testing on WebLOAD. “We migrated our load testing to WebLOAD in 2012 and have continued to use it since.” The team generate the same load as was measured using production logs and measures performance using hits per second, HTTP errors as well as other parameters.
Taking advantage of the integration between WebLOAD and Bamboo, the test team can automatically trigger WebLOAD tests from within Bamboo.
Taking advantage of the integration between WebLOAD and Bamboo, the test team can automatically trigger WebLOAD tests from within Bamboo.
User Feedback
Tomas Mica, Test Automation Engineer at Avg Technologies, praised WebLOAD’s capabilities:
WebLOAD is easy to use and at the same time offers excellent scripting capabilities. Test execution and analysis is also simple and user friendly
Results
Using WebLOAD, AVG Technologies can consistently maintain the high performance of its business-critical website.
Specifically, the testing team is able to: Verify transaction response time and identify errors. • Validate the stability of each build, including HTTP response statuses and other values. • Measure server-side statistics using dedicated Dynatrace agents.
According to Mica, “it is easy and simple to build even complex performance testing scenarios. We usually edit the recorded scripts to add some additional functionality like if/switch cases, random number generators or regex expressions.”
Specifically, the testing team is able to: Verify transaction response time and identify errors. • Validate the stability of each build, including HTTP response statuses and other values. • Measure server-side statistics using dedicated Dynatrace agents.
According to Mica, “it is easy and simple to build even complex performance testing scenarios. We usually edit the recorded scripts to add some additional functionality like if/switch cases, random number generators or regex expressions.”
Industry
Software
Business Type
Enterprise
Country
The Netherlands
