Why ITRex chose RedLine13 as the primary load testing tool

RedLine13 is a platform for building and running load tests. And it’s their approach to testing that made our QA team try it out and eventually switch to it.

Let's look at an example to see how it does that. Simulating load with, say, Apache JMeter alone, it’s quite difficult to scale. Even though the tool allows you to run numerous distributed tests, a master node often becomes a bottleneck when you go beyond 500 simulated users. The test setup process is quite complex, too. First, you need to start up the required number of servers, then install all the needed packages to each server, configure a scheduler for the tests to start at the same time, set up a quick way to terminate testing on all servers to prevent a complete shutdown and finally collect the output and compile a test results report. RedLine13 spares you the effort — it automatically creates the required number of AWS instances and runs tests on them, showing test results in real time. And once testing is completed, the platform terminates the instances and provides a convenient final report. This solves the scalability issue and allows software testing companies to easily simulate thousands of users and generate tens of thousands of requests. Running load testing with RedLine13 is inexpensive, too. The testing cost is made up only of AWS’s charges for instance usage and the cost of your subscription.

One of our customers, an ecommerce platform owner, struggled with the platform’s response time and downtimes, so their bounce rates went up and sales decreased. And since the platform performance directly impacted the performance of their business, the customer turned to us to identify the platform’s operating capacity and detect bottlenecks. To do that, we used RedLine13 to run JMeter tests on AWS servers. We configured the tool in a way that allowed us to simulate the behavior of thousands of users in real locations for more accurate testing results. In less than an hour, we got a comprehensive test results report and determined the platform’s response time, the number of users the platform can handle without service degradation, and the load at which the application started throwing errors. Another example is testing an online photography platform for a company that planned to increase the number of users from around 1,000 to 40,000 and needed to make sure that the system handles the load. We applied RedLine13 to test the application and the alternative servers simulating tens of thousands of users in real-life locations.

We determined that the current server crashed with around 3,000 active users and provided recommendations on how to improve the app performance.

With software performance being the key to success among users, load testing will continue to stay in focus. If you continue to lose customers and revenue due to long response times or suffer from shutdowns, contact us for assistance in performance testing. And RedLine13 will help us test fast while retaining ultimate test results reliability.