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Load-Testing

JMeter vs OctoPerf

Today's blog will be a short video to demonstrate how quick the recording process is with OctoPerf when compared to JMeter. We always say that OctoPerf makes JMeter easier from the design to the test results, this video will show you how the recording process can be done twice as fast with OctoPerf.

And that is not counting how we cut the complexity of the recording process to a few clicks compared to all you have to do with JMeter.

With OctoPerf:

  • From your browser press F12 and activate persistent log
  • Navigate
  • Export as HAR file
  • Connect to OctoPerf and import the HAR file

Load testing in 5 minutes

If you know OctoPerf, you've probably figured by now that we can manage complete test scenarios from end to end along with server monitoring and configurable results. But when you put it this way it is not clear how fast OctoPerf is able to run a test. Let's take a couple of minutes today to discover how quick it can be to record and replay a script with OctoPerf.

Record from your browser

First we are going to use our public demo application: https://petstore.octoperf.com/.

The fastest way to record is to use your browser. I strongly recommend FireFox since he will save the content of responses and that might be useful later on. But if you are using chrome, note it works the same way. The best way to capture all the traffic from your application is to open a new private window (CTRL+SHIFT+P on firefox). That way you have no cache or cookies, then just press F12 and move to the network tab:

Firefox record

Monitoring in action: Apache Httpd

This blog post is a step-by-step guide for monitoring Apache Httpd using OctoPerf. We use WordPress as a sample application.

Prerequisites

Before monitoring an infrastructure we need:

  • to install WordPress using Docker,
  • to configure an on-premise Host,
  • and to create a virtual user that browse the different pages.

You can skip to the monitoring chapter if you are familiar with these steps or directly to the analysis to get the results.

Cloud testing vs Internal testing

The rise of cloud platforms lead to a major evolution for load and performance testing. Since generating load requires a powerful infrastructure for a short period of time, one might even argue this is the perfect use case. But since we started OctoPerf we had a lot of feedback from users wanting to test from their own machines for a lot of good reasons.

Web application does not mean web-site

First of all, not all web applications are available on the internet. In particular test environments, which are usually mostly meant to be used internally. As testing the application before its deployment is important, the load tests are often done on such environments.

Also, large companies have a wide range of intranet applications that can't be accessed from outside their network. Of course they need tests and in that case testing from the cloud does not make much sense.

Should I test my external providers

If you ever recorded a load testing scenario on a website you probably noticed that the list of external links can be scary: Server List

Plus these links might occur several times, making your user profile difficult to read. Because of this even a simple task like separating the different steps into distinct transactions can become tedious: Lots of requests

Every time I work on such tests the question is always the same: "Do we need to simulate these requests?"