Load Testing Blog
Cookie Debugging From the Testcase Editor in Web Performance Tester 6.5
Load Tester 6.5 adds a quick and easy option for inspecting cookies in your testcase, and reviewing how they are used in a replay. Starting with Load Tester 6.5, the testcase editor adds two new columns: Cookies Sent (by the browser, to the server), and Cookies Received (by the browser, from the server). To enable these columns, simply select Options -> Columns.
The columns will display the number of cookies present in a transaction. In the case of a web page, it will identify the number of unique cookies sent or received. Simply hover over for a tool-tip, which will … Continue reading »
Web Performance QA Tester and Load Tester 6.4 Released
Real-browser testing can increase your productivity over other testing methods. The features added in the 6.4 release will help you work even more efficiently!
Locator Suggestions
One of the more challenging aspects of working with real-browser testcases is locating the element that you need to interact with. Starting in 6.4, a suggestion button next to every locator field will provide a variety of different locators that you can try if the default locator does not work. These suggestions also help you learn how to create locators – as you will see a wide variety of locator suggestions provided.
Read more about Continue reading »
Automated Choice configuration in Web Performance Tester 6.4
When building a testcase to simulate your users, at some point, you’ll want to ask how much variation you can add to your testcase. Real users may be doing searches, but there’s a good chance that your users are using different search terms. Likewise, users may be entering records, but most likely not every record should be entered identically. Every version of Load Tester & QA Tester support the use of datasets, to make it easy to create a list of terms, which can be supplied back as a virtual user traverses their workflow. However, for drop-downs or radio buttons, … Continue reading »
Best Practices for Recording a Testcase to Work the First Time
Sometimes, HTTP testcase don’t work immediately after being recorded. Your application may require special configuration, or your workflow may need some special data entry in order to work in a repeatable fashion. However, sometimes the problem can be compounded by easily avoidable conditions.
Recommendation 1: Close unnecessary applications while recording
During recording, Load Tester will capture HTTP and HTTPS network traffic from your workstation as you record. This allows Load Tester to observe your recorded browser window, and child windows that may be spawned from it. If you have other browser windows open, e-mail clients, etc, these can all interfere with 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 »
Windows VPN support available in Load Tester 5.4
If you’ve ever used Load Tester on a machine with Windows VPN configurations, it may have seemed strange that Load Tester would become unable to record while the VPN was connected. Disconnecting the VPN would allow Load Tester to record normally. Fortunately, this is improved in Load Tester 5.4, so recording & playback work as expected while a VPN is connected.
To understand how this improvement works, let’s take a look first at why VPNs need special configuration.
When you Connect to your VPN, the VPN connection is established, giving you access to the remote network. However, separate from the VPN Properties, … 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 »
How Much Bandwidth Do You Need To Do a Load Test?
One of the common questions people are interested in is finding out how much a test is going to cost. There are a lot of factors that go into this equation, such as getting an appropriately sized testing license, configuring a test server environment, reserving hardware for Load Engines, and bandwidth costs between the Load Engines and the content delivery servers (such as a CDN or origin servers). Let’s take a look at just how we might calculate the bandwidth charges that are involved in a single test.
If your site is only needs to support a few hundred users, then … 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 »