Archive for 2008
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
This is a relatively new example of how to use JMeter with WebSphere MQ. This approach is a clever way of inserting messages into MQ using a JMS sampler (point to point) with a JNDI binding within MQ.
I had not heard of this approach before and am sure it will ...
Posted in MQ, Java, JMeter | No Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Often when performance testing in a black box environment, you are left with the onerous responsibility to report against response time performance.
A typical approach by performance testers is to rely on 95th percentiles, which is effectively a Service Level Agreement (SLA) saying that 95 percent of all my samples have ...
Posted in LoadRunner, Analysis, Tools, JMeter | 5 Comments »
Monday, August 18th, 2008
When/if I am asked to conduct interviews again for potential performance test analysts, I think I will include this question in my repertoire to suss out those in the know, and those just, um, pretending ...
Here is a great analogy of throughput and latency. I don't pretend to understand queuing ...
Posted in Tuning | No Comments »
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
A new version of FireWatir has been released. This includes some fixes related to Firefox 3 but more importantly, it marks the merger of FireWatir and Watir projects, allowing for tighter coupling of methods and functionality between the two, allowing you to write less code =)
To use FireWatir, you will ...
Posted in Ruby, watir | No Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2008
In an effort to get more actively involved with the open source community, I've recently starting working with another colleague on a new site called justaddwatir.com. This is an exciting collaboration of examples for web application testing in ruby (watir - pronounced "water").
Watir is a simple open-source library for ...
Posted in Ruby, watir | No Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2008
This is most likely because the JMeter recording proxy does not support the https protocol. If it's a screen you can live without, you can just stop/start the proxy recorder around that page (I use the Firefox plugin called FoxyProxy to quickly switch between different proxy configurations).
However, if it is ...
Posted in JMeter | No Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Just a quick post for myself so I don't forget... I needed to generate a random alpha for use in a LoadRunner web vuser script. The native LoadRunner parameters can do random numerics and date/times but I couldn't find a way to generate only characters, as one might need to ...
Posted in LoadRunner | No Comments »
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Another post in this current theme of JMeter tips and tricks... You will hear LoadRunner consultants preaching to the converted about the requirement to correlate data accurately. What they're referring to, is making sure that dynamic data received by the client from the server (typically in a response body, header ...
Posted in JMeter | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
This plugin has been around for a while and it's definitely worth including in your JMeter library if you want to go for a glossy finish! The StatAggVisualizer will transform your graphs
from this to this
If you roll-up your transactions into separate transaction controllers as I demonstrated in a previous ...
Posted in JMeter | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
When performance testing I often need to spy on TCP (http) traffic between the client and server on a frequent basis. This is pretty much a staple of any performance test script development effort.
In the past I've relied heavily on trace options within LoadRunner and the like, but often find ...
Posted in OSX, Ruby, Tools, Productivity, Windows | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I've been working on a light weight performance monitoring solution which can be hosted on a LAMP (or WAMP, or OSX =) installation and uses the Google chart API to present data. Data is populated by custom Ruby scripts that either use ssh or perfmon (typeperf) to collect performance metrics ...
Posted in Statistics, Analysis, Tuning, SiteScope | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
I've recently started following a blog which sets weekly programming challenges. I'm getting sick of Nintendo DS brain training and thought I'd try something more relevant to my line of work. Also, this gives me a good opportunity to learn more about my favoured scripting language at present, which is ...
Posted in Ruby, Programming | No Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2008
I've been working with JMeter of late and after speaking with some people at conferences and the like, I thought it would be good to share what I've learned along the way in building, structuring and executing JMeter test plans.
One of the first things I like to do when performance ...
Posted in Testing, JMeter | 17 Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
Recently I attended Railscamp 08 in Sydney Australia for a weekend of code, beer and bzflag. For my 'project' I decided on brushing up my my Ruby skills and constructing a simple framework from which I could structure watir test cases.
Specifically I wanted to achieve the following:
Create some form of ...
Posted in Ruby, Automation, watir | No Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
If you are a rails fan you will probably recommend using active record instead, but if you just want to hack away at your mysql db from within your Ruby code, you may find this handy...
I'm currently using a wamp box to serve up content for performance metrics. What I ...
Posted in Ruby, Windows | 2 Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
I recently attended the 2008 conference for Continuous Integration in Melbourne, and mixed with like minded professionals involved with all aspects of CI and testing in general.
In short this is a great (free) opportunity to attend a conference using an open session format. By that I mean the conference ...
Posted in General | No Comments »
Friday, June 27th, 2008
If diff -u or wdiff isn't cutting it for your correlating requirements when scripting load harnesses, you might want to try daisydiff as an alternative ... * Works with badly formed HTML that can be found "in the wild".
* The diffing is more ...
Posted in Tools, Productivity, Testing | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Went to the third RailsCamp held in a scout hall near Gosford NSW last weekend; my brain has just about got back to normal after 3 solid days of drinking and coding =)
RailsCamp is a get together of mostly Rails developers, but also a fairly eclectic mix of Ruby hackers ...
Posted in General, Ruby, Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
By now you've probably heard of watir or Web Application Testing In Ruby, a great automation framework which supports Microsoft Internet Explorer, and recently came in at number 3 as a popular oss tool on this blog.
I've been using this tool mostly from a windows box, and knew of the ...
Posted in Ruby, Automation, watir | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Recently had a requirement to construct a LoadRunner harness that could sftp files (over ssh) to and from remote servers. As some of the harnesses were already written in Java (for loading of JMS queues) it made sense to use a Java Vuser to achieve the result required.
A work colleague ...
Posted in LoadRunner, Java, Security | No Comments »
