SPEED KILLS? Not on the Internet, where businesses are always looking for ways to make their Web sites and online applications run faster. Lately, however, the need for speed has reached a fever pitch, and it's mostly because so many of us are doing business online. At the same time, fierce competition in the IT world has forced companies to launch their sites or applications as quickly as possible. In an environment such as this, load testing often gets short shrift. But if you don't perform proper load testing, then your site or application may not run fast enough to prevent users from going elsewhere -- and that's a great way to lose sales.

Thanks to RadView and its new WebLoad 4.5 package, help is only a purchase away. The solution, which consists of three distinct parts (a console, a load machine, and a probing client), lets you verify the scalability and integrity of a Web application by generating loads composed of virtual clients that simulate real-world traffic.

Each of these virtual-client behaviors is controlled via test agendas -- JavaScript programs that merely play back manual entries. These programs can perform tasks such as issuing a certain number of Enter keys on a page to test your site's back-end processing capabilities. Furthermore, you can use the test agendas to specify the site you want to test, the type of tests you want to perform, and the testing variables you plan to use. (Applying the same variables across the board is a good way to achieve consistency in your testing process.)

Although the programs are written in JavaScript, WebLoad assumes no up-front knowledge of the language: The package comes with tools to help you record testing activities right from the comfort of your browser.

Once written, these client behaviors are then run against WebLoad, which executes and displays your application's response both graphically

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