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Load Testing Blog

Load testing without think times?

There are a few key parameters that you must control in order to launch relevant tests. I believe think time is one of those, and it is so often overlooked that I would like to take some time to highlight what it stands for. Any quick search on your favorite search engine will tell you that think times in load testing are meant to reproduce human interaction time. As a load testing script is usually composed of a list of requests, it's easy to understand how replaying them with think time is one more step toward a realistic behavior. But this doesn't mean it's easy to understand how to use and configure it.

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

Upgrade to AngularJs 1.6

When we started developing our load testing solution we had to choose a technology to create the UI. Most of us had previous experiences with GWT or Vaadin but we were not satisfied with it. It took us too much effort to create a sketch of the application and it didn't even look good.

So, we gave a try to AngularJS, even though none of us knew a bit of JavaScript. It felt really productive and a few weeks later we had a nice first version of OctoPerf that could start performance tests and display reports.

Three years later we added lots of features to our load testing solution and the code base reaches almost 10K lines of JS. In the meantime, Angular2 came out and AngularJS evolved to close the gap.

So, during the past months we took some time to upgrade our frontend to AngularJS 1.6 and to prepare the ground for Angular2:

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