Performance testing generally checks how the system performs and behaves. Performance testing examines reliability, scalability, responsiveness, stability, resource usage and speed of your software and infrastructure. Different kinds of performance tests give you different information. Before performance testing, it’s significant to determine your system’s business objectives, so you can understand if your system behaves perfectly or not according to the user’s needs.
After carrying out performance testing, you can examine different KPIs, such as errors per second, the number of virtual users, hits per second, latency, response time, and bytes per second (throughput), as well as the connection between them. With the help of such reports, you can recognize bugs, flaws, errors, and bottlenecks, and decide what needs to be done.
When should you use Performance Testing? The moment when you want to test your app and website performances plus networks, servers, databases, etc.
Performance Testing for NYRR (New York Road Runners)
ImpactQA did performance testing for New York Road Runner (NYRR), a marathon website using Blazemeter. Here is how we carried out the testing:
We wanted to stress test a .NET application and were not sure if we wanted to test using VSTS or JMeter. VSTS has its special advantages while JMeter could easily be configured in BlazeMeter. The .NET application was to be tested for a load of 10K users and the challenge was to test it remotely. The web server was hosted in the US and the tests were being conducted from a remote location in India.
To simulate a real-time load environment we needed the client machine (lead generating machine) in the US (the servers were already hosted in the US). We needed 10 machines of 8 GB RAM and 3.0 GHz processor). Acquiring such machines in a short time frame in the US and that too only 2 weeks was not only an expensive affair but also time-consuming and not worth the price.
That’s where BlazeMeter brings into play. With the help of BlazeMeter, we could easily simulate the load using the BlazeMeter as the client machine. The beauty of BlazeMeter is that it allows you to hit a server as if you are based out of that country — the screenshot below.
There is also yet another user-friendly feature of BlazeMeter that allowed the user to set the parameters by dragging the slider. See below.
We selected 290 threads (number of concurrent users) to load test. The duration of the Load Test was 1 hour.
We also want to share our experience of scripting a .NET application using JMeter where we were faced with a unique problem while scripting — the problem with ViewState. Although this had nothing to do with us using BlazeMeter we thought it would be a good idea to put it in this blog.
The problem is if we do not correlate the ViewState variable the JMeter script may run 1st time but in the subsequent run, the script will create problems. The reason for this is that in the first run, the application may accept your recorded ViewState value but when you run the script next time, it will fail as it will no longer accept the previous view state value.
Correlate the ViewState in the script if they exist in the application. Execute the following steps:
1- Find the ViewState parameter
2- Now see the HTTP Request Name (in our case its login)
3- Search for the ViewState (Search in View Result tree) in the response of the login that is just above the login in which you will find the ViewState parameter.
4- Extract it by using “Regular Expression Extractor” in the recorded “Login” sampler
5- Now use the “Reference Name” (in our case it is ViewState_Login) as a variable name.
Conclusion:
BlazeMeter is a great platform and delivers complete shift-left testing. It has been trusted by the big giants and SMEs to deliver shift-left continuous testing at scale. It also saves time, improves coverage, accuracy and reduces complexity.
Through BlazeMeter, we have successfully run performance testing for our client NYRR and fixed all loopholes and glitches.
Originally published at https://www.impactqa.com on August 8, 2019.
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