The last thing a business wants is to be known as an unreliable and poorly performing service, especially if there are similar solutions a few clicks away. So being aware of the performance of a WebRTC application or any other software solution is a must to avoid issues in the future. A solution can be developed by experienced people and tested before it is released, but even so it doesn’t mean performance degradations will never appear.
As holiday season winds down, we can reflect on the reverse load test that we did to make sure our customers could prepare for their own holiday traffic. What’s a reverse load test? OK, it's a term we just made up. But it started like any load test, with two systems: the load generator and the system under test (SUT). The focus of our test, however, was inverted. In normal load tests, testers really care only about how the SUT performs—that’s the point of the test.
At k6, we get frequent requests to compare k6 vs. LoadRunner, and since I am an experienced user with LoadRunner (even certified), I will try to put both tools head to head. But comparing these tools is difficult as their components do not match 1:1. Each is a robust ecosystem with different parts, some doing multiple things that make straight comparisons more complicated. And on top of that, we constantly get new features that match up with many other components.
This post explains how to get started with xk6-browser, a k6 extension that adds browser-level APIs to interact with browsers and collect web performance metrics as part of your k6 tests.