Professional Facebook application testing (including load testing) is available from the experts at Facebook Testing.
Benefits
Run realistic tests of any size
One of the great difficulties of Facebook application development is the difficulty in running large-scale tests due to the large number of Facebook accounts required, and the Facebook Terms of Use which does not allow automated systems to access the Facebook servers. These issues are explained in depth in Load testing Facebook apps (Part 1) and Load testing Facebook apps (Part 2).
FriendRunner acts as a drop-in replacement for the Facebook servers, and so allows you to run your tests with as many users as you'd like. Furthermore, FriendRunner's automated test system runs the entire test for you once you create a test script to define the actions for a single user.
Profile how your application interacts with the Facebook API
Since FriendRunner stands in for the Facebook servers, it can analyze the API calls that your application makes to the Facebook server. This will allow you to fully understand the interactions, and identify issues that will create performance problems such as:
- Multiple calls to the same function with the same parameters - something that could easily be cached
- Calling API functions that Facebook has deprecated
Use the demographics you require
FriendRunner does not rely on the real Facebook user base to create its virtual users, but rather creates its own. This means that you can choose to run your test with a "generic" user base or one that is tailored for your needs. As an example, your virtual users can be predominently of a certain age, nationality, or a speaker of whatever language you require. If necessary, we can control the connectivity of your test users, even create some hyper-connected (e.g. several thousand friends) users that cause many applications to crash when they encounter.
View meaningful application performance statistics
When tests are run through the Facebook servers, performance statistics are difficult to measure due to:
- Network latency
- Conversion of FBML to HTML
- Busy Facebook infrastructure
Since these things are variable and non-reproduceable, it's very hard to compare timings from one test run against another, something that's important if you change the application for better performance.
Because of how FriendRunner works, it can factor these things out, making the performance timings it measures both meaningful and comparable.
To learn more about testing Facebook applications, be sure to check out Test Facebook.
FriendRunner Alert monitors the Facebook Platform and automatically tests all Facebook's changes against your application. You'll be alerted to any problems that occur so that you can fix them before your users encounter them.
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