Emulating Real-Life Conditions

After recording a scenario, you create a load test that will simulate the recorded actions for several virtual users (emulate a load for the server). You can specify not only the number of virtual users that LoadComplete will simulate, but also additional settings that allow emulating “real-life” conditions for the created load test.

Specifying such conditions, you can create more powerful and reliable load tests.

The main features that assist you in simulating realistic conditions for a load test are as follows:

• Increasing the number of users. With LoadComplete you can simulate not just a predetermined number of virtual users, but also a growing number that increases every time a specified period expires. This feature is called load profile. You use it to set not only the time period, but also the starting number of users, the increment number and the total number of users for the load test. Creating such tests is very helpful when you need to check how many users your web server supports. For more information, see Defining Workload Profile.

• Emulating a massive load. LoadComplete lets you simulate a massive load for the tested web server using the special continuous load feature. It allows executing the specified test nonstop for a number of times unless the specified period expires. For example, if your test takes 2 minutes to be executed, but you want it to be executed in 10 minutes, you can easily do that using the continuous load feature. For more information, see Setting The Overall Test Duration.

• Parameterizing tests. While recording a scenario, you may need to specify some parameters that will be used for further test runs. For example, you can enter some search terms, user names and so on in the application’s fields. However, it is not a good practice to play back a test with recorded data for each user as it does not simulate the real-life conditions. To solve the problem, you can parameterize your load test using special variables. A variable can store desired parameterizing data and your test’s requests can use this variable during the test run. For more information, see About Variables.

• Emulating browsers, network connection bandwidth and browsing speed. Real users visit a web site using various browsers, the bandwidth of their Internet connection varies and they spend variable time on each page. You can configure all these parameters when creating load tests in LoadComplete:

  • You can specify browsers and connection bandwidth for virtual users.

  • You can specify browsing time for each tested page (we call it page think time, because it simulates the period when a user is viewing the page and thinking).

  • You can easily randomize the think time for simulated scenarios to emulate real user activity better.

  See Creating and Configuring Load Tests.

• Simulating concurrent requests. To download a web page, modern web browsers send requests to the server using several simultaneous connections. These parallel requests download images, scripts, CSS files and other resources located on the page. Unlike many other load testing tools, LoadComplete automatically detects and simulates parallel requests, that is, it sends requests like a browser would. This makes the simulation closer to real-world conditions. See Configuring Parallel Requests.

See Also

LoadComplete Overview
Creating Your First Test
Load Testing With LoadComplete