Load Testing Blog
Load Tester 4.2 Beta Released
One of the things that makes Web Performance software great is the tight cooperation between our load testing services and software developers. Our load testing engineers are always running over to the software engineers and begging for changes to make their lives easier, and the 4.2 beta is the first in a series of upgrades designed to put these internal upgrades into your hands.
One of the tasks that takes a load testing engineer a significant amount of time is configuring fields, the way that each virtual user can enter unique data during a testcase. Load Tester 4.2 includes an enhanced … Continue reading »
Web Performance 4.2 (beta) Migration Guide
This document provides details for users of Web Performance Load Tester version 4.1 who wish to upgrade to Web Performance Load Tester version 4.2. Load Tester 4.2 is more powerful and flexible than previous versions of Load Tester. For the most part, Load Tester 4.2 can automatically import and upgrade repositories that were written from previous versions. There are a small number of changes that existing users will want to be aware of in advance.
Once a repository has been opened in version 4.2, it will be impossible to open that repository in any older version of Load Tester. Load Tester … Continue reading »
New field editing options in Load Tester 4.2
In my previous post, I detailed some of the UI customizations included in the new Fields view. While I know testers will appreciate those, I think you will like the new field configuration options even more.
The most important change is the increase of the number of supported datasources. The three existing options (constant, dataset and user variable) have been augmented with Recorded, Text with replaced regions, Concatenation, File upload and Transform datasources:
These new datasources, some of which were previously available in limited contexts, are now available wherever you need them. The Text with replaced regions source allows any sub-part … Continue reading »
Fields View customizations added in Load Tester 4.2
The Fields View is one of the most frequently used parts of Load Tester. As a result of some of the features added in the upcoming 4.2 release it was going to need a lot of enhancements – so we decided to give it a complete overhaul. Current users of Load Tester will find it very familiar, but much more powerful than the previous iteration. One aspect is the ability to customize what is shown in the view and how it is presented.
One of the first things you will notice is the fields are now color coded, to help you … 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 »
User-Friendly Server Monitor Licensing in 4.2
At Web Performance we offer software licenses for two products: Web Performance Load Tester (also known as the “controller”) and the Web Performance Advanced Server Analysis module (also known as the “server monitor”). The controller is a user-friendly tool to create and execute load test scripts, while the server monitor is a headless tool that gathers diagnostic information about potentially problematic servers. Working together, these tools can quickly and efficiently identify specific problem areas.
Our belief is that software licensing should be as quick and painless as possible, which is why we designed the controller to automatically distribute licenses to all … Continue reading »
New feature: Run a Load Test from the Command Line
A number of customers have asked us about adding a load test to their automated nightly test harnesses. An early and frequent testing cycle is the quickest (and least expensive) way to identify problems — imagine being able to correlate performance results with specific revision numbers from your source control repository.
We already had the capability to run a single-user replay from the command line, but this week, we added support for running complete load tests, which will be available as part of the upcoming Web Performance Load Tester version 4.2. From the command line, it will be possible to:
Execute any … Continue reading »
Editing Datasets Made Easier in 4.2
In the upcoming release of Web Performance Load Tester 4.2 it is now easier to edit datasets. In previous releases of Load Tester, deleting rows of data required either selecting each row individually and manually deleting it or exporting the dataset to an excel spreadsheet, removing the data and importing the file back to Load Tester. With Web Performance Load Tester 4.2, you can now simply highlight all the rows you want to remove and click on the “remove dataset row” icon. Adding rows is just as easy, simply click on the “add dataset rows” icon.
Continue reading »
Web Performance at the Software Test Professionals Conference
Michael Czeiszperger, founder of Web Performance, Inc., will be speaking in the Performance Testing track at the upcoming Software Testing Professionals Conference March 22-24 in Nashville, TN. The talk is called Wishful Thinking and Poor Planning: Load Testing in the Real World, and is based on experience with over 590 clients. This session discusses how to deal with what actually happens in the real world of performance testing: ill-defined or non-existent customer requirements, truncated budgets and schedules, and mysterious crashes under load. This talk will outline the best ways to make sure a website meets all performance requirements despite … 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.