If you’re here, you’re interested in load testing your application or website, and that’s awesome. In this article we aren’t going to talk about Gatling as a load-testing tool and how you can use it to build faster, more resilient applications. Instead, we will look at some of the key benefits of load testing and the costs of not implementing load testing into your development process.
On a similar topic, you can also check our other article: the beginner guide to why load testing is important.
"Do I need to load test my application?"
Of course, our answer is a resounding YES. We’re load testing specialists. So let’s examine why it’s important and how it can help you avoid every company's nightmare…
Downtime
Hopefully, if you're here, you know what downtime is, and you’re trying as hard as you can to avoid it. If you’re new to the internet or unfamiliar with the terminology, though, downtime occurs when your website, service, or application is offline. There are many causes of downtime, some of which are, unfortunately, completely out of your control, such as outages at your hosting provider. However, downtime can also be caused by server overload or insufficient resources to handle the traffic that you're receiving, here a comprehensive load-testing strategy can help.
The cost of downtime
To help understand why avoiding downtime is crucial, let's talk about the cost; for e-commerce sites, even a minute of downtime can mean huge losses. Gremlin.com released this tool showing the estimated cost of downtime per hour or minute for the largest e-commerce providers can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. On days such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day, where server outages due to traffic spikes are more common, these numbers get even higher as more sales are lost.
If you’re in a service-based industry, downtime can also cause massive losses. In October of 2021, Facebook and its related services went down for over 6 hours. With an estimated loss of $163,565 per minute, Facebook is estimated to have lost over 100 million dollars during the outage. Additionally, Facebook’s (now Meta) stock price fell 5%, reflecting a loss of trust in the service due to the extended outage.
Finally, downtime and outages can be just as costly when they occur on internal tools. In 2022, teams are more distributed than ever, and we rely increasingly on tools and services to keep us connected. When these tools fail, your employees are unable to work, and your company can lose hours of productivity when the services they need are unavailable to them.
It’s easy to see why limiting downtime in whatever you do is essential. All told, Atlassian recently estimated the cost of downtime for a medium to large enterprise to be around $9,000/minute.
Yikes! How can I use Gatling and Load Testing to help avoid downtime?
To ensure that your application or website is resilient enough to withstand the traffic you expect to receive, you can implement a series of different load tests. We’ve got a great article here on the different types of tests you can perform and what they look like.
As mentioned above, implementing load tests into your CI/CD process is also extremely important. One of the leading causes of downtime is actually human error, and by creating a comprehensive set of tests and running them in a staging environment before any deployment, you can ensure that nothing you are implementing can bring your site or application down. Gatling Enterprise implements directly with many CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo; we also have a CI script that can be used to create an integration with GitLab. You can start testing today with a fast setup with Gatling Enterprise Cloud and start ensuring you’re doing everything you can to limit your downtime.
