Sometimes, HTTP testcase don’t work immediately after being recorded. Your application may require special configuration, or your workflow may need some special data entry in order to work in a repeatable fashion. However, sometimes the problem can be compounded by easily avoidable conditions.
Recommendation 1: Close unnecessary applications while recording
During recording, Load Tester will capture HTTP and HTTPS network traffic from your workstation as you record. This allows Load Tester to observe your recorded browser window, and child windows that may be spawned from it. If you have other browser windows open, e-mail clients, etc, these can all interfere with the … Continue reading »
Ever since I began the work of adding real-browser support to Load Tester, I have been eager to apply that technology to QA and functional testing. As I learned about Selenium/WebDriver and how QA testers were using it, I saw a need for a powerful, easy-to-use tool that builds on Selenium/WebDriver. This release is our first step towards addressing that need. This premier release of QA Tester gives testers a rich UI environment to create test cases with little or no programming experience required.
Test cases can be run together to validate that a test site is functioning correctly, or they … Continue reading »
Comic-Con represents the worst-case scenario for any website. As the event’s popularity grows, so does the load on its ticketing servers. This year, as many as 900,000 visitors competed for 130,000 tickets—all at the exact same time.
Load Tester 6.1 adds the ability to perform file uploads within real-browser testcases. See the link for instructions on using this new feature.
The release updates support for Chrome to include versions 33-36.
In addition, we have improved the user distribution algorithm specifically for real-browser tests. The real-browser replay logs now include annotations about datasource usage, so you can easily see, for example, which login was used from a dataset when an error occurred. See the change log for the additional bug fixes contained in the release.
If you’re an existing Web Performance Load Tester™ customer you may be wondering if the real browser capability will be included in Load Tester 6.0. Because the real browser technology is so different, Load Tester 6.0 is being released in two different editions: Load Tester PRO™ for virtual browsers, and Load Tester RB™ for real browsers.
Load Tester PRO 6.0 Upgrades
If you currently own a license for Load Tester PRO™ you’ll be receiving a free upgrade to the 6.0 release, but that release will not include real browser load testing functionality. If you’re interested in trying out real browsers, Load … Continue reading »
Load Tester RB™ introduces an exciting new capability: generating load with real browsers using Selenium/WebDriver. Instead of simulated browsers hitting your website, WebDriver controls actual browsers, each one behaving as if an actual user was sitting there clicking and typing. There is no more accurate way to do web testing, and you have absolute confidence that your website is being hit with the most realistic web traffic, and thus are getting the most accurate pictures of your website’s performance.
Our beta customers have reported being able to more quickly develop test cases for complicated websites, drastically cutting the amount of time it … Continue reading »
There are several different aspects to a question like this. The aspect that I’m going to address is: “How do I know that the load generator is accurate when it’s running a lot of users?” Or put another way, “How do I know that the load generator itself isn’t overloaded and is reporting inaccurate results?”
I could get all theoretical on you, citing a variety of technologies and design approaches used in our software to ensure it is accurate. I’d show some nice, official-looking white papers and report all the successes that our other customers have experienced using our software. But … Continue reading »
Load Tester 6 introduces an exciting new capability: generating load with real browsers. This technology, leveraging the Selenium/WebDriver project, brings a number of important advantages:
Testcase configuration and debugging is more intuitive
Test results accurately describe the end-user experience
Testing very complex and sophisticated AJAXy applications is much easier
Here is a pic of what a testcase looks like when using real browsers for testing. We hope you’ll agree that it is much more intuitive:
We are confident these improvements make Load Tester a more efficient and pleasant tool to use – but now we want to hear what YOU think about it! Are … Continue reading »
Comparing the two directly is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because they measure different things. Actually, Load Tester measures a lot of the same things for each, but what is generally considered the most important metric – Page Duration – is actually measuring a different aspect of performance in each case.
Virtual Browsers
Virtual Browsers work at the HTTP layer – they send the same HTTP messages to the server that real browsers would send. The Page Duration measures the time from the beginning of the first request that is sent to the server to the end of the last response for a … Continue reading »
Earlier last month, Microsoft began rolling out IE 11 updates for Windows 7 users. Now, with the most recent release of Load Tester 5.5, you can rest assured that Load Tester will continue to allow you to record your testcases using the upgraded IE 11.
IE 11 includes a number of new enhancements (many of which are reserved for Windows 8.1 customers). However, on Windows 7, users can still benefit from improved performance and standards support.
One of the interesting modifications of note is a new change to IE’s user agent header. Starting with IE 11, the browser … Continue reading »
