Did your shopping app crash during Black Friday? As large-scale promotional activities approach , e-commerce platforms often receive a large amount of traffic . This surge in traffic puts tremendous pressure on the website’s server, database, and network bandwidth. If you are not careful, it may cause the website to crash, causing serious loss of user experience, or even direct sales loss. Therefore, many e-commerce platforms will conduct load testing in advance to evaluate the performance of the system under high pressure by simulating a large number of user visits. This article will use an e-commerce website case to introduce in detail what load testing is and its key elements, and explore in depth how to use residential-proxies for load testing design.

What Is Load Testing? What Are the Key Elements ?

Load testing is a non-functional test that aims to evaluate the performance of a system under stress conditions by simulating high concurrent users or a large number of requests. The main goal of load testing is to find the performance bottleneck of the system and ensure that the system can run stably and maintain a good response speed during the actual business peak period. The key elements of load testing are:

Concurrent users/requests

Concurrency is one of the core indicators of load testing. It refers to the number of user requests initiated to the system at the same time in the same period of time. The setting of concurrency is usually based on actual business needs. For example, during shopping festivals such as “Double Eleven”, there may be tens of thousands of users accessing e-commerce websites in the same period of time.

Response time

Response time refers to the time it takes for a system to receive a request and return a result. In load testing, response time directly affects the user experience. If the response time is too long, users may give up purchasing due to the long waiting time, which in turn affects sales.

Throughput

Throughput is the number of requests that a system can handle per unit time. A higher throughput means that the system can handle more requests under high load, and is one of the important indicators for measuring system performance.

Resource Utilization

During the load test, the system resource utilization (such as CPU, memory, network bandwidth, etc.) is also an indicator that needs to be focused on. Under high load, the rational use of system resources can avoid bottlenecks and ensure stable operation of the system.

Error rate

In load testing, the error rate is the proportion of requests that have errors during processing. A high error rate usually indicates that the system cannot work properly under the current load and may need to be optimized or expanded.

Through these key elements, load testing helps enterprises identify and resolve potential performance issues and ensure that the system remains stable and efficient under high load.

The Role of Residential-Proxies in Load Testing

Residential-proxies are IP addresses provided through real user Internet connections. These IP addresses are usually from home users, so they are more secure, reliable, and less likely to be blocked than data center proxies. In load testing, using residential-proxies can effectively simulate real user environments and help companies conduct more realistic tests.

Simulate real user behavior: The IP addresses provided by residential-proxies are from real home users, which can simulate user requests from different geographical locations and different network environments. This real user behavior simulation helps load testing more accurately reflect the performance of the system in actual use.

Real IP address: In a high load test, if all requests come from the same IP address, the target server may consider these requests as malicious and block them. Using a residential proxy, this can be avoided because each request comes from a different real IP address.

Large-scale concurrent testing: With residential-proxies, you can easily increase the number of concurrent users in load testing. Different proxy IPs can initiate multiple requests at the same time, simulating large-scale user access, providing a strong test basis for the system’s high load capacity.

Improve test results: Residential-proxies can also simulate more complex user access scenarios by dynamically switching IP addresses, further improving the effect and coverage of load testing. This is especially important for systems such as e-commerce websites that need to face global users.

Load Test Design — Taking an E-commerce Website As an Example

To help you better understand the application of residential-proxies in load testing, we will explain it in detail through a specific case.

Case Background

A large e-commerce platform is about to usher in an expected traffic peak during a promotion. In order to ensure the smooth operation of the website during the peak period, the technical team decided to conduct a comprehensive load test. Due to the international nature of the promotion, the test needs to simulate a large number of user visits from different regions around the world.

Test Design

1.Concurrent user simulation:

It is estimated that the number of users online at the same time during the event is about 50,000. In order to simulate this high-load scenario, the test will gradually increase the number of concurrent users in stages, eventually reaching 50,000 concurrent users.

2.Use LumiProxy residential proxy:

In order to simulate the access of global users, the test team decided to use a residential proxy. LumiProxy was chosen here, which provides IPs from different regions around the world, can simulate real user behavior, and has high concealment and security. LumiProxy allows dynamic IP switching during load testing, which is very helpful for simulating changing user access patterns.

3.Test steps:

• Login test: simulate users logging into the e-commerce platform to verify the load capacity of the login page and background authentication system.
• Browsing products: Users randomly browse products of different categories to test the loading speed of product pages and the smoothness of image loading.
• Shopping cart operation: Add products to the shopping cart to test the stability and response time of the shopping cart system.
• Payment process: simulate the user’s payment operation and test the load capacity of the payment gateway and backend order processing system.
• Consult customer service: simulate a user initiating a consultation request to customer service to test the responsiveness of the customer service system.

4.Code example:

The following is a code example of concurrent user simulation using LumiProxy residential proxy, assuming that Python’s requests library and threading multithreading library are used:

import requests
import threading

# LumiProxy proxy server IP and port
proxy_host = "http://proxy.lumiproxy.com"
proxy_port = "8080"

# Username and Password
proxy_username = "your_username"
proxy_password = "your_password"

# Request header information
headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36'
}

# Proxy Configuration
proxies = {
'http': f"http://{proxy_username}:{proxy_password}@{proxy_host}:{proxy_port}",
'https': f"http://{proxy_username}:{proxy_password}@{proxy_host}:{proxy_port}"
}

#Simulate a single user request
def simulate_user():
try:
# Login Request
        response = requests.get("http://ecommerce-website.com/login", headers=headers, proxies=proxies)
        print(f"Login status: {response.status_code}")

        # view Products
        response = requests.get("http://ecommerce-website.com/product/12345", headers=headers, proxies=proxies)
        print(f"Product page status: {response.status_code}")

        # add to the cart
        response = requests.post("http://ecommerce-website.com/cart/add", data={'product_id': '12345'}, headers=headers, proxies=proxies)
        print(f"Add to cart status: {response.status_code}")

        # payment simulation
        response = requests.post("http://ecommerce-website.com/checkout", data={'cart_id': '67890'}, headers=headers, proxies=proxies)
        print(f"Checkout status: {response.status_code}")

    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Request failed: {e}")

# simulate multi-user concurrency
def simulate_concurrent_users(user_count):
    threads = []
    for i in range(user_count):
        thread = threading.Thread(target=simulate_user)
        threads.append(thread)
        thread.start()

    for thread in threads:
        thread.join()

# start load testing, simulate 50,000 concurrent users
simulate_concurrent_users(50000)

5.Test result analysis :

In actual tests, as the number of concurrent users increases, the system response time gradually increases, but it is within a reasonable range. At the same time, the system throughput remains stable, proving that the system can handle a large number of requests under the expected load.

Summarize

Load testing is an important means to ensure system performance, and residential-proxies play an indispensable role in this. Through the case in this article, we show how to use LumiProxy residential-proxies to load test e-commerce websites and ensure that the system can run stably during the peak period of promotional activities . I hope you can also use proxy services to perform load testing and more accurately simulate the real user environment to ensure the reliability of test results.