Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Gatling is a load testing tool for measuring the performance of web applications. As such, it supports the following protocols: HTTP, WebSockets, Server-sent events. Other protocols are also supported either by Gatling itself (like JMS) or by community plugins. Gatling load testing scenarios are defined in code, more specifically using a specific DSL. This guide focuses on the basics of writing a simulation to test an HTTP application: OctoPerf’s sample PetStore.

Almost every business today runs online. The internet is one of the easiest avenues for businesses to reach users, and websites are a great way to impress your customers. So, when you’re building a web application for your business, it’s important that you make it the best version it can be. To make sure that your web application is good enough to impress customers and avoid any negative impact, you have to test your application and fix any issues.

The Swift Package Manager allows you to create standalone Swift applications both on Linux and macOS. You can build and run these apps and you have the ability to write unit tests for your codebase. Xcode ships with the XCTest framework, but you may not know that this is an open-source library. It's available on every single platform where you can install Swift.

In December, we updated OctoPerf to use the latest JMeter version. Although, as a minor version, it doesn’t bring a lot of new features, it is always better to stay up to date with the latest bugfixes. We had to implement a small change in OctoPerf because JMeter now properly enforces the cache control headers in every situation. To avoid any confusion, cache control headers have now been disabled by default in OctoPerf.

Writing tests is an underappreciated part of software development. It usually distracts us from our primary goal and makes us feel we aren’t being productive. However, these tests are a great way to ensure our code works as expected, and they can save us plenty of headaches when we don’t have full control of certain parts of a project (for example, when we are working on the client app and another colleague is working on the server).

Nowadays, in the era of instant gratification, when everyone want everything in a matter of moments, understanding the performance of your website, web application, web service is more important than has ever been. Using web performance tools to understand how your application behaves is easy and a best practice that you should follow on a daily basis.