Best Practices

To get the most out of your Load Test it is best if you follow few simple guidelines.

Local Load Test Run

Executing load test locally is often used while designing a user profile to execute valid HTTP requests. To get the most out of such run, there are few recommendations to keep in mind:

• Use a small amount of users - even one user is sufficient to follow up which of the requests are really executed.

• Use short time to run the test - the minimum time you can use is a minute and this is usually sufficient for all requests in a user profile to be executed.

• Use Fiddler to capture the traffic generated from the test run - that way you can follow up which are the successfully executed HTTP calls and if their responses are the expected.

• Use the Test Studio application log to find out what is the missing piece - the application log of Test Studio also records all actions while working within the tool. In a log, generated during a load test run, you can find see the executed HTTP requests.

• Collaborate with the application under test development team - nowadays web applications are complex and can be built with plenty of different technologies. If you need to load test a web page, you are not familiar in details with, it will be helpful to initiate a discussion with the development team about load testing with Test Studio. Certainly the developers of the application will be able to share specific information about the page and application server.

Remote Load Test List Run

Follow the below recommendations to prepare a load test to be executed on multiple machines.

• Make sure you have think times with deviations. Think Times with deviations have a random duration. By having some users at different intervals sitting out of the test (thinking) it not only mimics real world usage better, but it allows for your agents I/O to not be as congested. It may be counter intuitive, but having your virtual users stop to think for a time will actually increase the number of users and requests that your agent can complete.

• Use ramp times to build up your users from a small number to larger numbers. Again, if you start with a large consistent load, without any ramping, you will likely clog the I/O. By ramping up from lower numbers you give your think times better chances to get involved.

• Use more CPUs, Test Studio Load Agents are multi-threaded, so take advantage of that by giving more CPUs to your agents to increase throughput. In general approximately 8 users per CPU unit seems to be sufficient to have a realistic load testing results.

• Use more Agents. The more agent machines you use, the more networking ports you can use at any one time, freeing up congestion on the agent side.