I have setup many machines to control and generate load. My initial experiences was with LINUX based systems, then as the tools progressed, the operating systems regressed onto the Windows platform. It seemed that back in the days of KVM’s, setting a new background colour for each machine was the way to tell them apart. Next came the system information imprinted on a wallpaper with tools like BgInfo from SysInternals. Unfortunately for this approach, a majority of RDP clients are setup to remove wallpapers (and should be if they aren’t). So in 2011 do we have a better way of displaying machine information on the desktop?
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An Alternative to System Info Wallpaper
Posted on December 21st 2011 by Joel Deutscher
Building a realistic load profile with Analytics
Posted on December 13th 2011 by Joel Deutscher
One of the most important parts of a successful Performance Test is getting the requirements right. No matter what tool you use or how well you script, your test won’t succeed if you are not accurately simulating end-user activity on the application. Traditionally, the user volume has been a mix of current load levels from log files and projected load from the business. More recently, analytics have been so easily implementable that every site these days, even small blogs, have analytics information.
So how can we use Analytics to help build a realistic load profile for performance testing?
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Using mldap_modify & mldap_delete functions in LoadRunner
Posted on September 20th 2011 by Joel Deutscher
I have written before about using the LDAP protocol using LoadRunner. This time, I had a requirement to reset the passwords for all my test users before an execution. Luckily for me, there was already some shell scripts setup that utilised ldapmodify, so it was just a matter of converting them over to LoadRunner scripts.
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Performance Testing SOAP with LoadRunner – Basics
Posted on August 10th 2011 by Joel Deutscher
Web services are more commonly becoming the targets of Performance tests. This post aims to provide an introduction to testing SOAP with LoadRunner without using the Web Services VUser type. Why not use the Web Services Vuser? Errors like this
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Xml.XmlException: 'xsi' is an undeclared namespace.
Using the custom web request (as suggested by Wilson Mar, Stuart Moncrieff and many others) bypasses the XML validation steps of LoadRunner, which is a good thing. This is possible because SOAP is just XML over HTTP, so lets take a look.
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Quick Tip – LoadRunner Download Filters and Proxy Servers
Posted on May 24th 2011 by Joel Deutscher
A previously mentioned the move from a download filters black list to a white list to avoid hitting servers outside of our testing scope.
One interesting outcome of this change was a nasty C compile error.
Error: C interpreter run time error: Action.c (39): Error -- memory violation : Exception ACCESS_VIOLATION received.
As it turns out, as we were using a proxy auto-config (PAC) file and this error occurs if your download filters are set to block your pac files. Luckily, LoadRunner does report that the PAC file was “Not downloaded due to a filter”, yet on the very next line reports that it was “downloaded and evaluated successfully”
Starting to download the proxy automatic configuration script, URL="http://www.headwired.com/proxy.pac" [MsgId: MMSG-27097] Warning -26554: Not downloaded due to a filter, URL="http://www.headwired.com/proxy.pac" [MsgId: MWAR-26554] Proxy automatic configuration script (URL="http://www.headwired.com/proxy.pac") downloaded and evaluated successfully [MsgId: MMSG-27096]
Surely if iframes are considered a critical resource, then the PAC file should cause an error and not just a warning, especially when it causes such a poorly handled memory violation error.
Luckily adding the pac file location to your download filters include list fixes this problem.
