Load Testing Blog
Showing posts tagged “tutorial”
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 »
Generating Load from Multiple Regions – Load Tester 6.6
Load Tester’s cloud load generation feature includes the ability to use datacenters located in different geographical regions.
This post contains detailed steps for adding an Amazon EC2 account and for running a new test configuration. These instructions apply to Web Performance Load Tester 6.6 and up. For Load Tester 6.5 and earlier, see Generating Load from Multiple Countries – Load Tester 6.5.
Why Load Test From Multiple Regions?
Generating load from different regions enables more realistic load tests. Rather than using just local datacenters, tests can simulate traffic from all over the world rather than just local datacenters.
This feature also allows testing … Continue reading »
Generating Load from Multiple Regions – Load Tester 6.5
Load Tester’s cloud load generation feature includes the ability to use datacenters located in different geographical regions.
This post contains detailed steps for adding an Amazon EC2 account and for running a new test configuration. These instructions apply to Web Performance Load Tester 6.5 and earlier. For Load Tester 6.6 and up, see Generating Load from Multiple Countries – Load Tester 6.6.
Why Load Test From Multiple Regions?
Generating load from different regions enables more realistic load tests. Rather than using just local datacenters, tests can simulate traffic from all over the world rather than just local datacenters.
This feature also allows testing of … Continue reading »
REST/Web Services and API Load Testing
In this post, I’ll discuss why API testing is important, a typical situation that a tester might experience, and how to perform API testing with Web Performance Tester.
DynaTrace Support in Web Performance Load Tester 5.4
DynaTrace (now known as “Compuware APM for Enterprise Tiers”) is a tool to analyze performance as requests pass from the front-end webserver back to various application servers, database servers, and web services. It’s marketed as a way to obtain deep insight into performance problems without the overhead and inconvenience of other more intrusive profiling tools. During a load test, DynaTrace works best if requests are annotated with metadata. We added a feature to emit DynaTrace-compatible metadata to Load Tester 5.4.
DynaTrace support is a premium feature sold separately from Load Tester PRO or our other offerings, but you … Continue reading »
Scheduling Load Tests with Load Tester 5.4
Many of our customers want to run tests off-hours to minimize collateral inconveniences. For example, if the rest of your QA team is working on the same test server as you, it might behoove you to run a load test at 2:00 AM when the team is asleep. Load Tester has had the ability to schedule off-hours tests for years, but the feature remains a frequently asked question among potential testers.
In Load Tester 5.4’s streamlined user interface, you can schedule a test from the ‘Control’ menu by choosing “Schedule Load Test.” A “Scheduled Operation” dialog will appear, and you can … Continue reading »
Load Testing a Website with Captcha
More and more sites are having to add captcha security to thwart spam bots, making this a familiar sight:
But what happens when you need to do performance testing on such a site? One common question on our support line is how to configure a load testing tool to read the displayed text and type it in. The whole point of adding captcha security is to prevent an automated tool from accessing the website, so if it was easily bypassed by a load testing tool, then spammers could also use that same technique to access your website!
There … Continue reading »
Load Testing an Javascript or AJAX Application
Most of us are relieved that web applications are starting to behave more like desktop applications – i.e. smarter and easier to use. A little wow factor here and there doesn’t hurt either. Ease of use always has a cost, so it should come as no surprise that the AJAX applications are more difficult to develop. But you may be surprised that they can also be more difficult to load test.
The reason is fairly simple. Traditional web applications are relatively easy to model and simulate. The state of a user session, at any given time, is a combination of the … Continue reading »
Load Tester 4.2 Preview: Concatenating Values
The next release of Load Tester 4.2 offers a wealth of testcase configuration options, in order to allow users to configure more sophisticated testcases. In this example, let’s take a look at how Load Tester 4.2 can allow you to customize fields by concatenating values.
Take a simple example: you are provided with a list of users in a dataset format with two columns: First Name and Last Name.
In your testcase however, the format is different, and instead the user name is POSTed as a single field in the format “Lastname, Firstname”.
Load Tester 4.2 makes this easy with a new, powerful … Continue reading »
Custom Extractors in Web Performance Load Tester
This tutorial will outline the steps to configure a custom extractor in Load Tester. Extractors are used to recognize small pieces of data in your application and apply them to future transactions within a test case.