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Load Testing for the 2017 Eclipse

It has been 99 years since a solar eclipse has crossed the entire continental US, coast-to-coast. 14 states will be treated to 2½ minutes of total darkness by the August 2017 eclipse. I remember watching the partial solar eclipse of February 1979 in my school playground. I am (obviously) a little bit of a science geek, so when I got the assignment to load test the Eclipse Live 2017 site, I was excited. Besides the prestige, it’s really fun to be associated with a project that will be seen by millions, even in a minor role.

NASA hosts much of … Continue reading »

Server Monitoring Instructions for Services Customers

 
What Are You Installing?
For general information about the monitoring software check out the product information. The software is designed to be installed on production systems, and does not modify the registry or anything outside of the installation directory.  The downside is that on Windows the software is not a service and must be started by hand before the test. There are two modes of working– either the statistics can be collected by hand from each server and emailed to our engineers, OR the firewall has to be modified to open two ports to connect to the monitor.  Note that each server … Continue reading »

Cannot record with Chrome 58 (Common Name support dropped from SSL certificates)

When Load Tester record a testcase, it impersonates the website – the browser thinks it is talking to the website but it is actually talking to Load Tester’s recording proxy. For this to work with SSL, Load Tester has to provide a certificate that impersonates the website. These are auto-generated on demand and stored within the project workspace.
Starting in version 58, Chrome has dropped support for the Common Name (CN) field in a certificate. In this case, the Common Name field tells the browser what domain name the certificate applies to. This field has been deprecated and replaced by the … Continue reading »

How to Convert Selenium Scripts to Virtual Browser Scripts

Web Performance has discontinued direct support for Selenium/WebDriver in Load Tester. One of the limitations of load testing with Selenium/Web Driver is that it takes lots and lots of cloud machines to generate load. Virtual users, on the other hand, are very efficient, cheaply simulating up to millions of users. This blog post shows one possible option, playing back your selenium scripts directly into the Load Tester recorder where they can be edited and played back with lots of virtual users.
Install Load Tester
Download Load Tester and install it on your Windows machine if you haven’t already.  Double-click on the … Continue reading »

Load Tester No Longer uses Amazon DevPay to process Load Engine Payments

Some of our Load Tester customers have been receiving this warning email from Amazon’s DevPay:
Dear AWS DevPay Customer,
Our records indicate that you are a subscriber to the applications listed below, released through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevPay program:
• Web Performance, Inc.:  Load Tester load engine
We are writing to notify you that AWS will deprecate DevPay on July 31, 2017. All DevPay-based applications will be discontinued, and if your subscription is still active, it will be cancelled.  This action will not impact any other AWS offerings.
If you received this email then it only effects customers with Load Tester 5 and … Continue reading »

Real-browser support EOL

After the 6.6 release of Web Performance Tester, real-browser testcases will no longer be supported. We know that this feature is very important to some of you and we regret the difficulty this will bring. The 6.6 version will continue to support the real-browser testcases for those who have already created real-browser testcases or have purchased a license with the real-browser feature enabled. Note, however, that if Chrome is allowed to update itself on the machines running Web Performance Tester or the Web Performance Load engine, it may become incompatible with the Web Performance Tester 6.6 software. Our software requires an … Continue reading »

Support added for cloud engines in 5 more Amazon AWS EC2 regions

Load Tester now has support for the 4 newest AWS regions: Ohio, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Seoul and Mumbai.
Starting with the 6.6.14774 release, you will now be able to generate load from these regions using our built-in cloud engine support. You’ll need an AWS account, of course.
Unfortunately, not all of the new regions support the instance sizes that Load Tester supports:

Mumbai is missing m3.medium and c3.large
Sao Paulo is missing  m3.medium and c3.large
Ohio is missing m3.medium and t2.micro

Unfortunately, m3.medium is the size used by default in Load Tester, when starting cloud engines manually or automatically. So some care is required when using … Continue reading »

Installing Load Testing Software

Network setups and application designs vary from user to user and deciding how to implement Load Tester can be difficult. By understanding how Load Tester™ may be deployed within various environments, you’ll be able to more easily test and optimize your systems.

Upgrading repositories from 6.5 to 6.6

I’m more than a little proud that we have been able to keep our repository format backwards-compatible for the entire life of the product, with only a few minor bumps along the road. Unfortunately, that streak has come to an end. Thanks an oversight on my part in reviewing the compatibility of a 3rd-party library, some 6.5 repositories cannot be upgraded to 6.6 without some effort on your part.
TLDR: If you don’t use real-browser testcases, you get a pass – just upgrade as usual. Otherwise, before installing 6.6, open your repositories in 6.5 and delete all replays and load test … Continue reading »

Load Testing with 5,000,000 Concurrent Users

At Web Performance we’ve been running large scale tests for over a decade, the result of constant testing and measurement to make sure the results are valid. As websites get bigger, we’ve had to increase the size of our tests, creating thousands of computers in the cloud to generate up to 5,000,000 concurrent users at last count.

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