Website Front End Performance Testing Series - Part 3 - What is Front End Performance Test?

In the Part 2 of Website Front End Performance Testing Series, we identified, what is the front end of a website. This part of WFEPT Series is dedicated to learn what is front end performance test and how it differs from load tests.

Few years back, when we talked about website performance optimization, we meant optimizing its server-side only since web sites were mostly static and almost all the processing was done on server side. But, the arrival of modern web technologies like Javascript, AJAX and CSS has put lots of emphasis on "Application like" interactions of web applications which puts more and more complexity on the front end rather than backend.

Because of that, today, bad user experiences not only occur due to application, database, servers and infrastructures tuning but also due to the time it takes to load the web page and displaying its contents on end-user screen. This modern web applications architecture has forced the Performance Engineers to rethink about the performance testing and optimization strategies.

My First 06 months at the "Great Place to Work"

I had a dream that one day I will work at a 99X Technology, which was the workplace that I saw in my dreams. Later, I knew, I’m about to get a chance to work there, after facing my first interview at 99X Technology on 28th September 2013. After several interviews ending by an interview with my inspiring CEO Mano, I could convert my dream into reality on 4th November 2013.

It has been 06 months, since I joined 99X Technology. It is truly “the Great Place to Work”. It is the place for a “Millennial” to work. I loved the culture here since Day 01. That warmth welcome on first day will never fade away from my memories. This has become my second family with all the wonderful friends that I met at 99X Technology.  The experiences, guidance, encouragement, opportunities are countless for past 06 months that I worked here.

Last 06 months were full of new experiences, challenges and experiments, as Performance Engineering was totally new to me. I know, I could be a Software Development Engineer by title and continue what I was doing for 10 years. But I accepted this challenge as a Product Performance Engineer in the new service line of 99X Technology. After 06 months, I realized that it was one of the best decisions, I have taken.

It was Anushka Aiya and Tharinda Aiya, who guided me through the path of Performance Engineering. Without them, I won’t be able reach where I am now. And my buddy Dilan, it was you who made this place not only a workplace but a home for me. Thank you bro. And thanks to all my friends here at 99X Technology for making the best days of my life.

Website Front End Performance Testing Series - Part 2 - What is the Front End of a Website?

At the beginning of the month of April 2014, I started writing this article series named Website Front End Performance Testing. As I mentioned in the Part 1, this series contains dozen of articles which covers web application or website front end performance testing from basics to advanced concepts. This is the second part of WFEPT article series and we cover up separating frontend of a web application within this part. 

Backend Vs. Frontend

When I was starting my career as a Product Performance Engineer, I had this mess in my mind about how to separate backend and frontend of a software product for performance testing. I had to went through several article readings to resolve that mess about backend vs. frontend.

At the end of the day, I understood that, separation of backend and frontend of a software product in performance testing depends on the behavior of that particular software product. Before we start website frontend performance testing, it is necessary to clearly identify and understand what is the frontend.

Website Front End Performance Testing Series - Part 1 - Introduction

How many times have you visited to a website to accomplish a task and suddenly went to a different website because home page of the website that you visited first took long time to load? “46% of visitors will leave a preferred site if they experience technical or performance problems.” (Juniper Communications) In other words, “If your website is slow, your customers will go away!”.

Advent of Web 2.0 technologies like Javascript, Ajax, single page applications, now web applications are dynamic. Client side should be given due importance as well besides server side processing. A web application can be tested at two levels using two different types of software performance testing methods.

• Front-end / Client side
• Back-end / Server side 

Server side issues are extremely important because it can make the web application unstable and unusable. But it’s not the end of story in web application’s performance testing. Client side performance issues are also critical from performance perspectives because they have more impact on user experience. Furthermore, website front-end performance testing is fast as compared to back-end performance assessment which need a lot of requirement gathering, script modeling, load generation, code profiling etc. We are not going to discuss about front end performance testing in details here as we discuss about it in part three.