Crush the Rush: Holiday API Performance

This year, you and everyone on your team have a big responsibility: Make sure that your website, mobile app can handle the heavy volume of traffic that’s coming…soon.

Why Should I Care about Load Testing Right Now?

The holidays are just around the corner, and many other professionals are feverishly running performance analysis based on last year’s metrics and this year’s goals. We’re all trying to answer the question of how customer experiences are connected to our revenue streams? How do they respond to a slow experience? We’ve done webinars about this recently, but also consider the following from AlertSite’s “The Cost of your Website and Mobile App’s Poor Performance in 2015”:

What Does API Performance Have to Do With My Consumers?

Every web site, every mobile app needs data. Universally, getting data to customers means going through one or more APIs. Between the industry experience of the team at SmartBear and its partners, load testing in Ready! API can help you:

• Ensure that your systems are ready to support lots of traffic
• Be prepared to scale resources already identified as potentially problematic
• Eliminate common mistakes around e-commerce performance disasters

Am I the Only One That Feels Behind on Performance?

Not at all. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of not sufficiently load testing before you deliver your API and code changes, much as many people in our survey do:

From “Ensuring Predictable Performance for the Holiday Season” [WEBINAR]

Clearly, people know that performance is important, but don’t address the performance problem early enough in the software delivery lifecycle. As we all know, the earlier bugs are found and resolved, the less time and money they cost.

So What Do You Propose That I Do About It?

There are a number of things you need to do to have a minimum viable performance strategy. You may already implement some of the following practices, but for completeness, SmartBear recommends that you:

• Figure out exactly which user behaviors and workflows drive your holiday revenue most
• Proactively coordinate with other business units (think Sales and Marketing) on holiday promos
• Ensure visibility to existing system performance through both front-end and API monitoring
• Collaborate with all IT groups (developers, testers, operations) on concerns and historical issues
• Be proactive: run assessments, pre-production load tests based on anticipated traffic goals
• Determine your baseline on a 1x traffic multiplier, and estimate problematic peak multiples
• Know what it will cost to scale considering known resource issues (CPU, network, memory, disk)
• Brief your team and all stakeholders on your findings and your holiday performance strategy

In our experience, the best way to be prepared for the holiday rush is to get the right combination of people and tools involved. API performance impacts your consumers, your partners, and your technical teams.

So What’s the Catch?

There’s no catch! We just want you to have a great holiday, free from last minute, late night performance failures or scaling woes. That’s why we offer LoadUI NG Pro, the world’s API-focused load testing tool, in the Ready! API platform. If you don’t know what to do about your pre-production API performance, we encourage you to download and test your API performance out for free.