Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “Load Tester”
Load Testing is Not an Academic Problem
For Rowan University, ensuring that their students can get registered for classes is not an academic problem. If errors or system crashes prevent students from getting into the classes they need, it can have a serious impact on their academic careers, potentially even resulting in additional educational costs. So when the IT wizards at Rowan were planning significant upgrades to their hardware and the Banner 9 software from Ellucian to ensure the best possible experience for their students, they knew load testing was an essential part of the project.
Upgrading repositories from 6.5 to 6.6
I’m more than a little proud that we have been able to keep our repository format backwards-compatible for the entire life of the product, with only a few minor bumps along the road. Unfortunately, that streak has come to an end. Thanks an oversight on my part in reviewing the compatibility of a 3rd-party library, some 6.5 repositories cannot be upgraded to 6.6 without some effort on your part.
TLDR: If you don’t use real-browser testcases, you get a pass – just upgrade as usual. Otherwise, before installing 6.6, open your repositories in 6.5 and delete all replays and load test … Continue reading »
Testing Popup Windows
We often receive questions about how Load Tester handles popup windows. In this post, I’ll describe how Load Tester handles these elements and provide a sample recording.
How does Load Tester Handle Popups?
Users do not regularly encounter popups. As a result, these windows may appear to function differently from regular browser windows.
However, when recording using a virtual browser, Load Tester records any calls to the server. Replaying a recording or running a test will replay those calls whether issued from a normal browser window or a popup.
NOTE: The following method is only applicable to “Virtual Browser” recordings.
Recording a Popup Window
1. On the … Continue reading »
IE 11 Support Added in Latest Load Tester 5.5 patch
Earlier last month, Microsoft began rolling out IE 11 updates for Windows 7 users. Now, with the most recent release of Load Tester 5.5, you can rest assured that Load Tester will continue to allow you to record your testcases using the upgraded IE 11.
IE 11 includes a number of new enhancements (many of which are reserved for Windows 8.1 customers). However, on Windows 7, users can still benefit from improved performance and standards support.
One of the interesting modifications of note is a new change to IE’s user agent header. Starting with IE 11, the … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.4: Now on OSX!
Note: This blog post rates high in Google searches, but is a couple of years out of date. Please read this for the latest on our OSX load testing software.
Hi, I’m Michael Czeiszperger, the original author of the Load Tester 1.0 and 2.0. Although Load Tester originally ran on OSX, 10 years ago the future of that platform was very much up for grabs, and with 99% of our sales on Windows, the OSX version was dropped. Fast forward to 2013, and I decided that 10 years of running Load Tester on my OSX machine through an emulator was 10 … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.4 Released!
Our goal with Load Tester 5.4 was to build the easiest to use load testing tool, even if you had no experience with load testing. It should just make sense when you look at it, with every button in the right place and all of the right information at your fingertips. We’ve spent most of 2013 reworking the user interface, trying out several different ways of doing the normal load testing workflow, until it both looked great and let us get load testing done as quickly as possible.
But of course, user interface improvements weren’t the only changes: we threw in … Continue reading »
Stronger NTLM session security supported for Load Tester 5.4
Let’s say you’re testing an internal site which uses Integrated Windows Authentication. You may have already been running regular tests on this site with no difficulty. Then, an administrator runs a security tool (such as the Windows Security Configuration Wizard) and suddenly your Load Tests now fail with HTTP 401 Unauthorized responses.
What happened?
One cause of this can be a feature of NTLM security was enabled, requiring clients to support NTLMv2 “session” security. While this security feature is stronger, it is not universally supported by all clients, including legacy versions of Load Tester.
Getting past the issue is easy: just upgrade Load … Continue reading »
Monitoring Server Performance through Firewalls now easier with Proxy Tunnels in Load Tester 5.4
So you’re getting setup to run your next test. You’ve installed our server monitor agent on each server, and are ready to start collecting server data while the test is running. However, there’s a snag: your workstation is on a different network from the servers, and you’re not able to open up the firewall on the servers to forward traffic.
Enter Load Tester 5.4. Load Tester 5.4 supports connecting to server agents through a SOCKS proxy. This means that if you can get a SSH session open to even just one server behind the firewall, you can now monitor your servers.
Start … Continue reading »
Load Tester PRO 5.3 Released
Web Performance Inc is proud to release Load Tester PRO/LITE 5.3, which focuses on usability. The biggest change you’ll notice is the completely redesigned test case table, with inline editing, undo, drag and drop, multi-select, and new replay layout. Drag and drop works with either individual transactions or entire web pages, and as you play with the new widget notice details such as inline editing and customizable table columns. Select a series of web pages or transactions, and right-click to edit think times or page load time goals. The new table is also customizable; right-click on … Continue reading »
Spotting Problems the Easy Way with Load Tester 5 Visual Comparison
One of the most frustrating jobs of writing a testcase is figuring out what went wrong when the test gives you an error message. Other tools may give you terse error messages, indicating there is a problem with the page. Load Tester 5 now makes this easy an automatic with a quick Visual Content Compare tool.
Let’s take a look at an example testcase using a simple workflow:
User logs into a web site
The user selects a link on the greeting page
User logs out
When working with a dynamic web application like this, when a page changes, that’s OK. We expect the greeting … Continue reading »