Load Testing Blog
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Load Testing with IPv6 and the RackSpace Cloud
Over in this post, I showed how easy it is to configure IPv6 load testing in Load Tester — it’s all very easy with the possible exception of this part: “you need a load engine with IPv6 connectivity”. If you don’t have IPv6 connectivity from your location with sufficient bandwidth for testing or you need to test from another location, then you will access to a load generator (we call them load engines) with an IPv6 connection. Surprisingly, this can still be a challenge. Indeed, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that our own cloud engines don’t support IPv6 … Continue reading »
Load testing a website with IPv6 traffic
Are your apps ready for IPv6 users? Many organizations have started to support access to their applications via IPv6 addresses, and along with that comes the need to include IPv6 traffic in the load test plan. Indeed, we recently tested our customer portal to be sure it was accessible via IPv6 (it is – the application is deployed on Google’s AppEngine infrastructure, which includes IPv6 accessibility baked-in).
Of course, before you get to load testing, you should start with a basic connectivity check to ensure your website is accessible from IPv6 routes – you can use a tool such as … Continue reading »