BrowserMob Partners with FriendRunner

BrowserMob, the popular cloud-based load testing platform from Neustar has joined forces with FriendRunner to provide a powerful solution for load testing Facebook applications. With these platforms combined, developers will be better able to test Facebook applications and ensure they are ready for viral deployment before launching them publicly to the Facebook community.

BrowserMob allows developers to identify web performance bottlenecks, get a handle on the amount of traffic their site can handle, and make sure that applications are ready for launch. By partnering with FriendRunner, BrowserMob customers can overcome the traditional problems with testing Facebook applications.

Some of the key features of this combined solution include:

• Selenium open-source toolkit
• Export MySQL
• Fast set-up — start testing in minutes, plus run a free test immediately
• Supports testing of Flash applications
• And More….

For more information about the BrowserMob partnership with FriendRunner, please click here.

Load Test your Facebook Application!!

Once again, the need to load test your Facebook application before deployment has been proven out in the wild. Another company has seen their application crash and burn under a load that it either wasn’t expecting, or unable to deal with. The interesting part of this story, which seems to get told over and over, is the company that was the victim of the crash and the source of the load.

In this case, the application was Facebook’s newly released Facebook Stories application. This application allows users to tell the story about how they got onto Facebook and how it changed their life. The application became overwhelmed and eventually crashed due to the load placed on it by …

… rabid Justin Bieber fans

That’s right, I just wrote the most unlikely string of words that can show up in a blog about technology. The crash was reported by Justin himself, ironically on Twitter.

 Kids, don’t let this happen to your application. Before deployment, load test it with a tool like FriendRunner.

Update

Ahhh geez! Okay, this will teach me to trust Justin Bieber. All Facebook is now reporting that the rabid Justin Bieber fans never crashed the Facebook Stories app. Instead, he was asked to remove the tab for the application from his page because he was using it to solicit stories about himself instead of using it for the purpose it was intended for (How has Facebook changed your life?).

Okay, I was fooled, but the original story did have a believable provenance. I originally heard it from Randi Zuckerberg, who after all is the sister of …. She got it from All Facebook, which is a reliable source of great FB information.

I apologize to you dear reader, and will now make the commitment that this blog will never ever disseminate any more news about Justin Bieber, regardless of what it is or where it comes from.

Arrested for load testing your Facebook app??

Yes, it sounds crazy that you could get arrested for load testing a Facebook application, but that’s the implication for what’s been reported on All Facebook.

All Facebook reports that Power Ventures, creator of the social network aggregator Power.com is being sued by Facebook for violating their Terms Of Service. Power.com allows users to log into multiple social networking sites simultaneously – you log into their service and they log into the sites automatically. The problem is that Facebook has a very clear prohibition in their TOS against accessing their service by automated means, which is exactly what Power.com is doing. How Facebook sees this as a criminal act seems kind of crazy, but that’s exactly what’s happening.

So what does this have to do with load testing? Everything! The Facebook TOS (as well as a few other technical hurdles) prevent you from hooking a standard load testing tool up to Facebook to load test your newly created Facebook app. Kids, don’t try this at home, lest you get arrested. Better stick with a dedicated tool like FriendRunner that allows you to load test your Facebook app outside of the Facebook infrastructure.

Facebook Testing: Which metric is important?

Many people ask us which metric is best to use when performing a load test of a Facebook application. Common wisdom says that Page Load Time (PLT) works for web applications: it’s easy to calculate, seemingly applicable, and everyone understands what it means. However, it isn’t so useful in the Facebook world since it contains so much extraneous information that makes it hard to analyze anything with it.

Facebook Canvas applications

To understand why PLT is a bad idea for Canvas applications,  we must go back and understand the Canvas architecture. Users interact with Canvas applications by using a browser connected to the Facebook server which acts as a middleman and requests data from the app. The app may call APIs that interact with the Facebook server, and then ultimately return an FBML file to Facebook which renders it into HTML for return to the users bowser. The problem is that if we only look at PLT by measuring response time at the browser, we have all of this extra stuff being counted in the timing:

• Network latency between the browser and Facebook
• Time required by Facebook to figure out which application must be called, authenticating the request, etc.
• Time to render the FBML into HTML
• Time spent at the Facebook server servicing API calls

These “extraneous” functions will take an unpredictable amount of time depending on, among other things, the current load at the Facebook server. This will make it hard, if not impossible, to positively correlate the timings of two different test runs. Since one of the prime motivators of load testing is to see the effects of changes to the code on performance, metrics like these will ultimatly prove to be of little use.

Facebook Connect applications

Using PLT for Facebook Connect applications is a little bit better. Users interact with Facebook Connect applications directly, and do not need the Facebook server to act as the middleman. The only extraneous functionality being counted in the timing is the time spent at the Facebook Server responding to API calls. If there are many API calls being made, this will cause a bit of randomness in the metrics.

Application Response Times

In contrast to PLT, creating metrics based on the Application Response Time is much more meaningful and useful, although harder to calculate. Application Response Time should calculate the amount of time spent at the application and only the time spent at the application. Unfortunately, in contrast to PLT there’s no simple way to get the Application Response Time – you’ll need to do a little bit of work to get at it.

To calculate this, you’ll need to create a stopwatch function which starts when your application is called, and stops when the application completes the request and returns an FBML file to the caller. In between, the stopwatch needs to be paused when a Facebook API is called. Finally, those of you using PHP as your development platform should check out the microtime() function as it’s much more accurate than the standard time() function. If your application is able to keep up with all of the bookkeeping, you’ll have metrics that can accurately show you the effects on application performance from any changes you make.

For those of you who don’t want to be bothered with keeping track of all of these timing calculations, please note that FriendRunner does all of this for you automatically.