Load Testing Blog
Patch Available for IE SSL Bug
A recent Microsoft security advisory and subsequent patch unfortunately disabled SSL recording with Internet Explorer on all released versions of Web Performance Load Tester, Load Tester PRO, and Trainer. SSL recording with Firefox was not affect, but other browsers have not yet been tested.
If you have a current support contract you can update any 5.0 or later release by using Help->Software Updates, and selecting “Search for updates of currently installed features”. Follow the instructions to install patch 5.1.111161. If you have a current support contract, but have not yet upgraded to to 5.0 the most recent installer … Continue reading »
Load Tester PRO™ 5.1 Released
Fast on the heels of the initial 5.0 PRO release, 5.1 is a major upgrade that includes support for mobile load testing, a completely resigned load test design and control system, improved support for dynamically scalable websites, Internet Explorer 10 support, and portal license manager integration.
Mobile Load Testing
The increasing web traffic from mobile devices has been noticed for years, but how much does it really affect a website? A recent study shows that 7% of web traffic is from mobile devices, which includes both phones and tablets. Because these devices use different browsers, and sometimes access different versions of a … 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 »
Testing Auto-Scaling Servers with Load Tester 5.1
One of the easiest ways to create a system that keeps up with sudden increases in demand is to use auto-scaling systems offered by many cloud providers. The concept of bringing new systems online to handle demand is nothing new: this has also been used by CDNs for years to replicate high demand data to edge locations. Testing this type of system, however, can become more challenging when the auto-scaling relies on updating DNS records in order to route new users to new servers.
In Load Tester 5.0 and earlier, Load Tester could be set to Continue reading »
iPad or iPhone iOS Load Testing
With the rapid growth of tablets and smart phone purchases, the popularity of mobile browsers have increased significantly. Our own site has seen an increase in mobile traffic from 0.2% of two years ago, to 2.5% mobile traffic today. Due to the increase in popularity of mobile browsers, it is becoming essential to test the performance of your website on a mobile device as well.
Web Performance Load Tester records all the HTTP traffic between the browser and server through a transparent proxy, this allows for Load Tester to be flexible with the types of browsers that can be emulated during a … Continue reading »
HowTo: Generate 1 Million Virtual Users with Load Tester 5.0 PRO
Leading up to the release of Load Tester 5.0, the Web Performance development team focused heavily on improving our capability to run massive load tests. Today, Load Tester 5.0 is specifically engineered to deliver as many as 1 million virtual users while controlling 500 remote load engines.
This is a “how to” article for Load Tester 5.0 users wanting to run their own massive load tests.
Before you Start
There are a few things you absolutely need. First and foremost is a modern workstation for the controller. By modern, I mean a 64-bit architecture with at least 7 GB of working memory. … Continue reading »
XML automation support in Load Tester PRO 5
In Load Tester 4.2 we added a new fields view with vastly expanded options to configure each field. In Load Tester 4.3 we added support for JSON as well as ad-hoc custom regular expression and name-value delimited parsers. In Load Tester 5, we are adding support for XML automation. Hierarchical XML data structures that appear in form fields or as HTTP POST content will appear in the fields view, and Load Tester’s application state management (ASM) tool will automatically assign any XML value or attribute for which it can identify an appropriate data source.
Each XML field will be named after … Continue reading »
Troubleshooting Obsolete License Error
So your license is obsolete, what exactly does that mean? By default a Load Tester license is not set to expire unless it is a temporary license. An obsolete license essentially means that the license version does not match the Load Tester version number.
When a license is mismatched, the following message appears:
As you can see on the License Key Summary, the version code is listed as 4.2, however the current version of Load Tester I have installed is 4.3.
When a license shows up as obsolete, you have two options:
Match up the license version with a downgraded version … Continue reading »
Understanding the Page Grouper
One of the key capabilities of Web Performance Load Tester is the page grouper. This is one of those systems for which, the fewer people notice it, the better it is performing. Essentially the page grouper takes a long list of HTTP transactions in a test case and organizes them, using timing, and/or content and referrer analysis, into a series of logical pages.
If we do this well, we assume that the list of pages we see in a test script after a recording are the same as the logical pages an end user would witness in a browser — each … Continue reading »
Recording in Load Tester: What’s Going On?
Load Tester is designed to recognize common use patterns and transform them into working test cases with a minimum of user intervention. Our clients appreciate that Load Tester does a tremendous amount of work automatically. But, any load testing tool must be prepared to exercise the complexity of its target, and for some web applications even a simple test case can involve hundreds of variables.
This post will try to elucidate the stages of the recording process, which are, roughly:
Recording
Initial Inspection
Automatic Configuration
Manual Configuration
Replay
Validation
During the recording stage, we manually perform a use case in a web browser. Load Tester monitors our work … Continue reading »