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Load Testing Blog

SNCF - Case study

Most of you have already recognized the name SNCF, it is obviously one that is hard to miss when you live in France. But for everybody else, allow me to do a quick reminder of what SNCF stands for.

The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (Chemin de fer, literally, 'path of iron', means railway) is France's national state-owned railway company. It operates 32,000 km (20,000 mi) of route and in 2017 had €33.5 billion of sales in 120 countries. The SNCF Group employs more than 260,000 people.

source: Wikipedia

Lately, SNCF's IT strategy could be summarized as follows:

  • Have state-of-the-art, multi-cloud, application execution capabilities,
  • Work as a business partner with hand-picked software vendors to help them grow and learn from a real life use case.

This means re-thinking the strategy in many areas, including performance testing.

Julien Leclere
Julien Leclère is the Head of software factory at SNCF, with a range of 1500 applications.
The factory provides assets to manage the entire application lifecycle. Julien was looking for
a solution that could fit in the factory while still answering to a large variety of requirements.

To help with his task, Julien was assisted by Joaquin De Ibar Aguado who took the role of project manager on the migration to OctoPerf. Joaquin would help integrate OctoPerf in the factory as well as migrate a few key projects as a proof of concept.

OctoPerf 11.7 - Pacing, monitoring, dynatrace and more

This new release of OctoPerf brings a lot of long awaited features. This is all based on your feedback, so make sure to let us know what you would like to see in OctoPerf next!

Of course we have a few plans of our own for the future, but I strongly believe that a good software can only result from a good collaboration between users and developers.

Improvements

Pacing your execution

Throughput

If you ever had to execute a load test campaign you are probably aware that it's not only a question of concurrent users, you also need to define the execution rate of each user.

JMeter provides a Constant throughput timer that is also available in OctoPerf, this way you can define a target hit rate and the timer will increase or decrease to try to maintain this rate:

Throughput

The main problem with this timer is that it is incompatible with anything that influences sub requests like the automatic resources and follow redirects option.

It's also often difficult to translate real business transactions activity to a certain number of hits/s.

  • in JMeter
  • 10 min read

Asynchronous API Performance Testing with JMeter

The principles behind performance testing API’s does not differ from the principles behind the performance testing of any application.

Many API’s however are Asynchronous and a valid response from the API does not necessarily mean the transaction is complete which can cause a problem when measuring the performance of API’s.

There are however ways around this and we will explore these in this post.

Sample JMX and DB files for this blog post are available for download:

LINKBYNET et OctoPerf s’allient pour tester l’app mobile En’jo de Majikan.

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En tant que Services Providers, LINKBYNET a compris les enjeux liés à la performance des apps. C’est dans ce cadre, que la société MAJIKAN a fait appel aux équipes Performance de LINKBYNET. Le besoin principal du client, au-delà des fonctionnalités de son apps, est la séduction du webinaute grâce à une optimisation de la qualité de l’expérience utilisateur pour son application Enjo.

En’jo, est une nouvelle apps qui met en relation des particuliers et des artisans pour répondre à un besoin de dépannage d’urgence. Comme toute apps avant son déploiement, En’jo a dû faire face à de nombreux challenges liés à la performance. En effet, une apps qui connait des lenteurs ou des problématiques de performances dés son lancement aura du mal à convaincre. De plus, le délai de retour sur investissement peut être rallongé considérablement et la communication pointant les défauts de l’apps réalisée par les mobinautes peut entraver l’image de marque du produit et de la société. Les mobinautes attendent des entreprises une démarche proactive, le challenge de MAJIKAN était donc de lancer son apps Enjo et que celle-ci soit opérationnelle immédiatement.

Majikan logo

Install OctoPerf in your company

We have come a long way since the original release of the OctoPerf On-Premise Infra 30 months ago. We have added so many features since then that it felt important to regroup them in this blog post to highlight how easy it has become to install and manage your own OctoPerf server.

I will refer to our documentation a lot because all of these features are detailed there. But documentation can sometimes make the decision process more difficult just because of the sheer amount of information it gives. That's why the purpose of this post is to follow a simple use case and highlight all the possibilities on each step of the way.