Load Testing Blog
Real browsers vs virtual browsers: which to choose for your testing?
Since version 6, Web Performance Tester has supported two different ways to simulate user behavior on a website for testing: real browsers and virtual browsers. These two methods take very different approaches to the problem and each has different advantages and disadvantages. Those are not always obvious at first glance, so I’d like to run through the key difference to help you decide.
But first, a brief description of the two approaches:
Real browsers – When using the real-browser approach, the test is defined in terms of the actions the that a human would take in the browser in order to complete … Continue reading »
Debug real-browser tests with breakpoints in QA Tester and Load Tester
Since the first release of real-browser support, it has been possible to pause a testcase replay using the pause button. If you need to stop in the middle of a long testcase, however, it can inconvenient to sit and wait for the important part. Web Performance Tester™ (WPT) now supports breakpoints in real-browser testcases. To set or clear a breakpoint, select the step and choose “Toggle Breakpoint(s)” from the pop-up menu. The breakpoint will be indicated with a matching pause icon on the step.
During interactive replays, the virtual user will pause when it reaches any step with a breakpoint. … Continue reading »
Easily find an element with locator suggestions
Accurately and reliably locating the right element to interact with is one of the biggest challenges with real-browser testing, both in our products (QA Tester and Load Tester) as well as when coding tests to the Selenium/WebDriver APIs. Our upcoming 6.4 release provides suggestions for a variety of locators that may be a suitable replacement for the locator that was chosen during the testcase recording. If you are accustomed to using SeleniumIDE, you find that our implementation operates provides a familiar experience.
To access these suggestions, look for the light bulb icon next to the locator edit field. To … Continue reading »
Web Performance Introduces QA Tester™ with 6.2 release
Ever since I began the work of adding real-browser support to Load Tester, I have been eager to apply that technology to QA and functional testing. As I learned about Selenium/WebDriver and how QA testers were using it, I saw a need for a powerful, easy-to-use tool that builds on Selenium/WebDriver. This release is our first step towards addressing that need. This premier release of QA Tester gives testers a rich UI environment to create test cases with little or no programming experience required.
Test cases can be run together to validate that a test site is functioning correctly, or they … Continue reading »
Load Tester 6.1 Release
Load Tester 6.1 adds the ability to perform file uploads within real-browser testcases. See the link for instructions on using this new feature.
The release updates support for Chrome to include versions 33-36.
In addition, we have improved the user distribution algorithm specifically for real-browser tests. The real-browser replay logs now include annotations about datasource usage, so you can easily see, for example, which login was used from a dataset when an error occurred. See the change log for the additional bug fixes contained in the release.
How do you know if a load testing tool is accurate?
There are several different aspects to a question like this. The aspect that I’m going to address is: “How do I know that the load generator is accurate when it’s running a lot of users?” Or put another way, “How do I know that the load generator itself isn’t overloaded and is reporting inaccurate results?”
I could get all theoretical on you, citing a variety of technologies and design approaches used in our software to ensure it is accurate. I’d show some nice, official-looking white papers and report all the successes that our other customers have experienced using our software. But … Continue reading »
Load Tester 6.0 Beta 2 – Real Browsers
Load Tester 6 introduces an exciting new capability: generating load with real browsers. This technology, leveraging the Selenium/WebDriver project, brings a number of important advantages:
Testcase configuration and debugging is more intuitive
Test results accurately describe the end-user experience
Testing very complex and sophisticated AJAXy applications is much easier
Here is a pic of what a testcase looks like when using real browsers for testing. We hope you’ll agree that it is much more intuitive:
We are confident these improvements make Load Tester a more efficient and pleasant tool to use – but now we want to hear what YOU think about it! Are … Continue reading »
Accuracy of Load Testing with Real Browsers vs Virtual Browsers
Comparing the two directly is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because they measure different things. Actually, Load Tester measures a lot of the same things for each, but what is generally considered the most important metric – Page Duration – is actually measuring a different aspect of performance in each case.
Virtual Browsers
Virtual Browsers work at the HTTP layer – they send the same HTTP messages to the server that real browsers would send. The Page Duration measures the time from the beginning of the first request that is sent to the server to the end of the last response for a … Continue reading »
If you absolutely can not test your production system…
In my last post in this series, I asserted that you must test your production system and then promptly dismissed all the popular reasons for not doing so. But in the real world, things aren’t so simple. There will be cases where the production system can not be tested – for example, because test data can not be effectively purged from the system without a significant investment.
So, if you are in that situation, what can you do? If you cannot test your production environment, then you must recreate the production environment as precisely as possible. Every place that the … Continue reading »
Load Tester 5.2 Released
Yesterday we released Load Tester 5.2. This release contained a handful of UI improvements intended to improve the experience for first-time users. There are no changes in capabilities for PRO users in this version, so new license keys will not be issued except upon request. Don’t worry – the 5.3 release is coming right on its heels with some big UI improvements that we know all of our users will appreciate!
LITE users, however, will see a very big change in the 5.2 release compared with 5.1. This change both adds and subtracts important features to the LITE version. As a … Continue reading »