Load Testing Tool - TestComplete
Load testing, stress testing and scalability testing are essential parts of the entire development and testing process of web applications, such as e-commerce solutions.
Load testing involves simulating real-life workload conditions for the tested web application. It helps you determine various characteristics of the application working under a massive workload. Load tests can be run several times with different load levels to find out how various parts of your web application react to the varying load.
Stress testing helps you identify performance bottlenecks in your web application, determine the peak load (for example, the number of users) that brings your application into an unstable state and verify that it successfully recovers from fails. Stress testing means testing beyond the limits of the expected production conditions, for example, by simulating an extremely high workload or reducing the server resources.
Scalability testing lets you ensure that your web application is scalable, that is, it can handle an increased workload with added resources and determine whether it best scales up, by upgrading the server hardware, or out, by improving the application code to distribute processing across several servers. Scalability testing is performed as a series of load tests with different server hardware or software configurations while keeping other test environment characteristics unchanged.
AutomatedQA’s TestComplete allows you to perform all of these tasks. It can simulate real-life workload of thousands of concurrent users so that you can easily get answers to the following questions:
How does the server’s response time change when the number of users increases or decreases?
How many users can simultaneously work with the web server without a perceptible slowdown?
What load can crash the server application?
How do hardware and software changes affect the server’s performance?
And many others.
TestComplete’s load testing features include, but are not limited to, the following:
Easy Load Test Recording TestComplete’s point-and-click recorder is very easy to use for load testing. The recorder captures all HTTP, HTTPS and SOAP requests sent from the client computer(s) to the tested web server, regardless of the Internet browser you are using, the web server type (IIS, Apache, and so on) and platform (Windows, Linux, and so on). It also records web server responses and uses them to automatically validate actual responses during the load test runs.
Virtual User Emulation TestComplete plays back the recorded load tests using virtual users, which emulate real user activities and can work both in a series and concurrently. Each virtual user or user group has a number of adjustable characteristics, such as the connection speed (LAN, DSL, dial-up and so on), the browser to emulate (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and so on), the load test task to perform, the start delay and so on. You can also ramp up the load to check how your web server responds at peak hours.
Different load testing packages support a different number of virtual users: 5, 50, 250 or unlimited.
Distributed Load Testing To simulate real-world conditions and increase the load on the tested web server, you can distribute virtual users and user groups across multiple computers on your network. The result is like getting a bunch of human testers together to hammer your web server, so that you can ensure it can handle heavy workloads.
Visual or Scripted Load Test Management TestComplete allows you to create, configure and manage load tests visually as well as from scripts. While the visual approach is easier and more convenient for inexperienced testers, scripting enables automation experts to enhance load tests with programming logic, handle various load testing events, change the load test behavior on-the-fly and perform other advanced load testing tasks.
Adjustable Load Test Playback Options TestComplete provides a range of options to customize the playback of your load tests. You can choose how to handle cookies and view state, specify the request and response timeouts, authentication information and much more. You can also synchronize virtual users so that they perform certain tasks simultaneously by inserting rendezvous points into these tasks.
Dynamic Load Test Data TestComplete lets you dynamically modify virtual users’ requests to better simulate a variety of real users during load tetsing. For example, you can have virtual users populate forms with values fetched from databases, Excel spreadsheets, text files and other sources of your choice and verify that the server responds appropriately during load testing.
Comprehensive Load Testing Logs TestComplete generates in-depth load testing logs that include a summary as well as details on all operations performed by virtual users in a tabular form and graphs. You can view load test characteristics as the number of virtual users simulated, the number of connections to the server established, the number of requests sent, request and response time, bytes sent and received, average performance and much more. This allows you to assess the performance of your web servers and web applications and identify potential bottlenecks.
Load testing logs can be printed, exported, e-mailed to colleagues or published to an issue-tracking system directly from TestComplete.