Let’s imagine that you have a web site and you want to create a load test for it. Of course, the first problem is to choose a load testing tool. I will not write a lot about this step and will simply suppose that you have already selected WAPT or WAPT Pro. I have a right to do so, because this is my blog and I do believe that these tools are the best on the market (at least for their prices). On the other hand I do not want to fall into trivial advertising and persuade you to buy anything. Not here, not now.

So, I will refer to WAPT where it is needed, but the whole thing will remain true in general for any other similar product.

Now let’s get to work. First of all I have to say that most probably you will really need to do some work here. I know that this is a big surprise for many people who sincerely expect that they will only need to enter their web site name to a magic address bar and the product will do the rest for them.

Unfortunately the process is a bit more complex; however a good load testing tool can facilitate and automate it to a certain extent. The main idea is that it is not sufficient to enter only the first page of our web site. We also need to specify what site visitors will do on it. In other words, we need to record a typical user session.

WAPT has a special embedded browser window for this purpose. You only need to click the “Rec” button on the toolbar and enter an URL for your start page to the address bar. When the page is loaded, you can click any link on it to get to another page, fill forms, login and logout, click buttons, etc. All those actions will be recorded by WAPT. To emulate еру user activity in the test, the tool will just repeat these recorded actions. By the way, this is called a virtual user profile.

So, to create a test you need to record one or several virtual user profiles. You will also need to specify how many virtual users in your test will execute each profile simultaneously. The more users you add, the greater test load will be created for the web site.