How to create a test?

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.

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How to load test a web site?

When we do load testing, our goal is to emulate a real life situation when many users are trying to access our web site simultaneously. We know that the web site can serve one user without problems. We can check this easily with a browser, especially if we have a list of test cases at hand. This is called functional testing and we suppose that this stage is over.

We should also make sure that the site can handle concurrent user sessions. We can use 2 browser windows for that and check that still each user receives correct server replies and two sessions do not influence each other.

Ok. The last stage is a real load testing. Here we need to find out what will happen when 1000 users try to access the site simultaneously. Why 1000? It doesn’t matter. For some sites we need only 100, for some we want to make sure about 10,000. This is just an example.

So, what should we do? Of course, we will not run 1000 browser windows. Fortunately there are special load testing tools that can emulate the behavior of many real users and do this automatically. We will only need to specify how many users we want to emulate and, of course, what exactly each of these users will do on the web site.

Since we do not expect that every user will have a unique behavior, we can specify the behavior for a single user and make them all follow it. We can also specify several typical cases and use each one for a number of virtual users. For example, all customers of an online store can be divided to those who make purchases and those who just browse the site. We can create one profile for each of these types of users and add to the test 100 “purchasers” and 900 “viewers”. This will create a realistic emulation of our users.

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What it is and why…

Hello Everyone!

I am going to drop here some thoughts, ideas, comments, etc… Everything that will come to my mind as a result of working with our customers and discussing their web load testing projects. The goals, methods, problems, etc.

Of course, I very much hope that the result will be worth reading. So if you are intersted in the area, or just need to load test a web site and are looking for some info on that, possibly you will find some useful hints here.

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