Mercury Interactive Makes Stress Testing a Web Site Simple and Affordable; Astra SiteTest Generates over 4 Million Hits Using a Single Windows 95 or NT Workstation

Business Wire, Dec 9, 1996

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1996--A new software tool unveiled today by Mercury Interactive Corporation (NASDAQ: MERQ) will, for the first time, make Web site testing simple and affordable by enabling organizations to stress-test a Web site using a single Windows 95 or Windows NT workstation.

Webmasters can generate millions of actual hits against a Web server, with point and click ease, to help ensure performance and reliability of Internet/intranet applications.

Announced today at Internet World, Astra SiteTest will help Webmasters solve the problem of poor web site performance and failure. Web sites must be able to support millions of anticipated hits every day and deliver the performance required or it may discourage users from returning to a site and risk critical sales opportunities from site failure.

Recent Web site horror stories such as the IBM Olympic site and the CNN Interactive Election Day site, where service was almost completely terminated due to peak loads, are prime examples where the Web server could not support the increased user load.

By emulating real-life load conditions, Astra SiteTest spots potential performance problems before they occur -- before a site is deployed and during the application development lifecycle, and while the site is in use -- to ensure that users have a positive experience when surfing a site. Astra SiteTest is the industry's first native Windows NT and Windows 95 load testing product. It generates the equivalent load of an unprecedented 4.3 million HTTP hits to a Web server a day on a single workstation. By contrast, previous can run up to Web load testing products have required multiple UNIX workstations to simulate HTTP calls to a server.

"Companies in virtually every industry today have some kind of critical Web-based function, from sales, marketing and distribution to customer service operations," said Zohar Gilad, director of enterprise product marketing at Mercury Interactive. "When a user experiences lengthy delays or site failures, the advantages of a Web site are negated. With Astra SiteTest corporations can deliver higher-performance, more reliable Web sites, ensuring that they serve as the competitive tool that they were intended to be."

Astra SiteTest makes load testing easy by providing point-and-click Web site stress testing. Tailored to Webmasters, Astra SiteTest allows users to automatically generate test scripts by accessing the Web application to be tested using either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer. Astra SiteTest also automatically handles all Web features that often affect Web server accuracy and performance, including support for "cookies," proxy servers, user authentication, session IDs, CGI scripts, API calls, HTML forms and more.

For example, Astra SiteTest records cookies -- information packets exchanges between the browser and server -- to ensure accuracy and then plays then back. As a result, Webmasters can make sure that the use of cookies does not cause performance degradation. Likewise, Astra SiteTest also tests CGI scripts and API calls which often connect to database servers in order to ensure that performance is not affected.

In addition, Astra SiteTest offers Web data analysis tools to assess an application or a Web site's performance through clear, color-coded graphs and reports including throughput, number of connections per second, maximum response time and others. The graphs and reports can be easily exported to word processing or spreadsheet programs including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3.

Provides SSL Support for Testing Mission-Critical Applications

Until now, testing mission-critical applications, such as on-line banking and electronic commerce applications has been a manual process. Mercury Interactive automates this process by offering HTTP support, as well as, an optional SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Plug-in Pack to simplify and automate testing of secured Web sites that utilize the HTTPS protocol. Using the SSL Plug-in Pack, Astra SiteTest, connects to a Web server, just like a browser or Java applet, letting Webmasters exercise an application under real-life load conditions.

First Tool to Use Real-life Data to Troubleshoot Production Problems

Astra SiteTest can be used as a stand-alone product or as a plug-in to Astra -- now renamed Astra SiteManager -- a visual Web management tool. When used together, Webmasters can stress test a Web site using real-life traffic data generated from Astra SiteManager. The utilization of real-life data, which reflects users' actual traffic patterns on a site, rather than mock test data, allows users to generate more accurate tests for higher performance, more reliable Web sites.

Latest in Mercury Interactive's Line of Web Testing Tools

Mercury Interactive was the first to introduce technology for testing Web-based systems, with the introduction of WebTest. The technology is the foundation for its Web testing extensions to the company's client/server products, WinRunner, XRunner and LoadRunner. In October, the company introduced Astra, renamed Astra SiteManager, a visual Web management tool geared to help Webmasters and Web business managers improve the quality of corporate Web sites. Astra SiteManager adds additional functionality for load testing a Web site for improved performance and reliability of the site.