Defining and Reporting on Pages in LoadComplete
This post applies to LoadComplete versions 3.11 and earlier.
Defining pages in a performance test is a helpful way to organize your scenario, and is particularly important for reporting. For example, a reporting metric like Page Load Time only makes sense if it accurately reflects what you understand to be a "page" in your website or web app.
With LoadComplete, you can define where a page starts and ends either by choosing a pagination mode during recording (I recommend the "Only Manual" mode) or through manual page creation within the scenario editor (I recommend defining pages in the "Group by Pages" view).
But what is a page, exactly? Performance testers and end users probably have different ideas about what constitutes a page. For this reason, it's important to make sure we're all on the same page. :smileywink:
The end user is likely to think that a page is everything that's contained in one fully-rendered browser window. The performance tester, however, works with raw request transactions and thus has a more flexible view of pagination. The tester may, for example, decide to group all the traffic associated with a log in process as a single page, thereby enabling him or her to report on the execution time (or "page load time") of that particular process.
In LoadComplete, a page is a simply a convenient way to organize requests. Once you have established a performance baseline, creative grouping of requests into pages can help you isolate and test specific performance issues on your site or app.
