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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
How Many Users Can Your Website Handle?
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The most common question regarding a website’s performance is not how fast the website is or how it scales, but something more fundamental:
What should the performance goal be in terms of concurrent users?
Should it be one hundred concurrent users? A thousand? Ten thousand? Does it require one server or a hundred to handle the load?
There’s a good reason for how many times this question comes up: it’s tricky and … Continue reading »
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 »
You’ve recorded your test case, configured your datasets, and run your replays. You start up the load test and … you see numerous errors like this:
“The connection with the server was unexpectedly closed before starting the response.”
What’s going on? Well, one common reason for this error is a connection-related race condition between Load Tester and the web server due to the server’s configured persistent connection timeout.
Persistent connections are an HTTP mechanism for minimizing network connection overhead between the browser and the web server. If the client has the Connection request header set to Keep-Alive, and the server responds with the … Continue reading »
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