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I need to test order process on one of the websites. Problem is, website used JavaScript to make selections and few services I tried (site24x7.com being the best) don't seem to give me the results.

More info:

Website has been built and hosted at this one company. Website customers are complaining that ordering is very slow. We have seen it, but the developer company doesn't believe us. So we wanted to conduct a 3rd-party testing on a scheduled basis (probably 3-4 times a day only), with tests like "login and change online store", "place an order using specials", etc.

Anyone any services to recommend?

Thanks, Dami

Dami
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  • is the slowdown in performance at certain times in the day? does your host throttle network connections at all? do you have any stats on the number of visitors on the site simultaneously when the slowdowns are noticed? – Keith Jul 22 '09 at 18:56
  • well, the point is to prove that the website runs slow, not to explain to them how it should be done. Yes, performance is worse during evening, since it's pizzeria and people ordering at night after work. We do not have stats how many users at once and we don't know if they're throttling anything. – Dami Jul 22 '09 at 19:18
  • I would check your hosting agreement and SLA to see if you are throttled. is the slowdown is in between pages or whenever a client-server interaction is taking place? – Keith Jul 22 '09 at 19:59

5 Answers5

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You can look at Alertsite, www.alertsite.com. The have a transactional test you can run which will allow you to script out a series of events. We use it in house to login to an online learning application and run through several processes before logging out. The nice thing about it is that it will time the steps as well as the whole event with nice detailed charts which you can look at by hour, day or month. It should handle the javascript fine.

Charles
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  • I thought we have a winner, but turns out it doesn't play back correctly. I've contacted their support and they were like 'huh! this is a first!' and they're looking into it. Further development on the matter: now we only need to show total page load time, with everything on the page. Pictures, scripts, etc. Do not need to actually place an order, just test specific pages to load fully. Site24x7.com and pingdom.com can only do HTML code on a scheduled basis, but pingdom does have a manual tool to load the site: http://tools.pingdom.com/. This is what I need on scheduled basis. Thanks! – Dami Jul 24 '09 at 14:42
  • Contacted AlertSite support and they fixed it, so it seems that they'll be able to do what we need. This was the only service which was able to handle site's JavaScript correctly. Thanks for recommendation! – Dami Jul 28 '09 at 19:54
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I don't find it as robust as Selenium, but iMacros is a free addon for Firefox (and/or IE) that will let you record and perform "macros" within the browser.

I use it similar to what you've suggested... I record a small set of actions, then run them in a loop to generate performance data etc.

scunliffe
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  • Selenium didn't work out as it couldn't handle the JavaScript dropdown menu for store search radius. Alertsite / DejaClick works, but few glitches. Selenium doesn't at all. – Dami Jul 24 '09 at 21:32
  • hmm, too bad... but good to know! – scunliffe Jul 25 '09 at 12:11
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I don't know of any third party services that will do it for you, but there are various tools you can set up to run automated tests. One example is Selenium, basically you record a script of actions, and it will perform the actions and give you the results. Thus it can work with javascript, html, or flash applications with no problem. I also found a list of other testing tools.

davr
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Gomez provides a similar service that allows you to use Selenium to script and craft your tests. I think Pingdom does as well. Both of these have tiered pricing so YMMV.

One other alternative that's a bit more DIY but could be a great learning experience, is to leverage Davr's idea but run the Selenium tests via cron in something like EC2.

terryp
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  • thanks terryp. Since this is on consulting basis I doubt my customer will want to spend wads of cash on this, but I'll see if davr's suggestions would work for them. – Dami Jul 22 '09 at 18:57
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GomezNetworks or Keynote are good 3rd party payware services that can provide performance data and handle the javascript nature of the website.

dotcom-monitor.com seems to be another service that might help, but the key point is that you likely want 'transaction' monitoring, not just 'hit this URL' (though dotcom-monitor can do a form POST directly), and you want them to have full browser emulation (ie: javascript), not just simple HTML POST/GET etc

try googling 'web transaction monitoring service'

ericslaw
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  • Thanks ericslaw, I'll give GomezNetworks and Keynote a shot. Tried dotcom-monitor, not what I needed specifically, site24x7.com seemed to work better, still no cigar though. See my updated request in an answer to Charles (top of the page). Thanks! – Dami Jul 24 '09 at 14:45