[LoadUIWeb] Using LoadUIWeb on my own server?

Hi Hai,

I am not sure what LoadUIWeb server you are talking about...
LoadUIWeb is an application that records http(s) traffic produced by the web browser on the client. Then the recorded traffic may be parameterized (for example to simulate login as different users) and executed (again, on the client(s)) on behalf of one or more users to simulate a mass load on the tested web server.
Simulation is performed as http requests sent from the client side, so it can be executed against web server installed on any machine running any OS. The only requirement is that tested web server must be accessible via http.

Hi Alex,



It was my understanding that LoadUIWeb uses some sort of server to load test. I am probably wrong! I assume LoadUIWeb was similar to LoadRunner. LR has their servers across the country and to do a load test I upload my LR scripts onto their LR controller component and from there specify the amount of VU(s) and load test from there.



Can the free version of LoadUIWeb do true load testing?

Hi Hai,



> Can the free version of LoadUIWeb do true load testing?

Yes, definitely (though it may depend on your definition of 'true load testing' term :) )



Not sure about LoadUIWeb, but LoadUIWeb Pro also contains standalone component that can be installed on additional machines to increase the load on the tested server (as it is not recommended to create more than 200-250 VUs on one machine).

But even in this case all testing is done from clients and requires nothing to be installed on the server (though LoadUIWeb can monitor performance counters on the tested server).

Hi Alex,



If I just wanted to load test using only 200 VU at max, am I able to use the free version of LoadUIWeb to handle this test? Will the test still be considered a true load test with only 200 VU?

Hi Hai,



According to http://loaduiweb.org/go-pro/free-vs-pro.html, LoadUIWeb (free version) does not support distributed testing (that LoadUIWeb Pro does) but, according to http://loaduiweb.org/docs/gettingstarted/productoverview/load-testing-basic-concepts.html still supports 200 VUs for the single box.



> Will the test still be considered a true load test with only 200 VU?

There is no definite criteria as for what load test can be considered a true load test as this depends on your expectations and requirements for the tested software. For example, if you are testing custom web-based bug-tracking system for internal use and you know for sure that no more than 50 users will use it concurrently, then 200 or even 100 VUs load will be a perfectly acceptable load test. On the contrary, for the online auction site with the expectation of 300-500 bids per minute, 200 VUs most probably will not generate the comparable load.



The final note: you may consider Think Time parameter (http://loaduiweb.org/docs/testing/editing/changing-think-time.html) and set it to lower value to equivalently emulate the load that corresponds to more than 200 VUs.

Hi Alex,



So the free version of loaduiweb will be able to handle a load test with a max of only 200 users. Great! However, another question, say my computer only has 256K mb, it's an old model. How will that affect the load test. I figure that if I test with a slower computer than any slow response I see, how will I know that the slow response was due to the web application or due to my computer not being able to handle the test. That my computer' limited resources are causing the slow response of my web application.

Hi Hai,



You need to monitor the performance of the computer that runs your load tests and corellate its performance state with the state of the load test. To monitor the performance state of computer you need to use performance counters provided by the OS. Monitoring itself can be done using the LoadUIWeb itself, or the tools provided by OS (for example, using Windows Performance Monitor) or some third party tools.

For example, if you monitor local CPU and memory usage that report you 80-95% or CPU load and 55% or memory load and at the same time see slow load test response performanse and see no errors on the server side (no errors in neither web nor backend data server), then you can make a conclusion that your local CPU is a bottleneck for the given case. You can either execute tests from another more powerful computer, or upgrade the CPU on the current box, or decrease the number of VUs used in the test.



I would recommend you to read the following help topics:

http://loaduiweb.org/docs/testing/running/monitoring/monitoring-application-server-toc.html

http://loaduiweb.org/docs/usecases/typical-use-cases-toc.html



Hope, this will help...

Hi Alex,



I was wondering how does LoadUIWeb store the information that it receives during test. Does it save it into a sql table or something? Where is the data being stored at?



Thanks!

Also, does loaduiweb have a script/programming language format of the scenarios? For example LoadRunner we can view the script in C and for selenium webdriver we can use Java. Does loaduiweb have some programming language like this in the back of the UI?

Hi Hai,



> [...] how does LoadUIWeb store the information that it receives during test.

LoadUIWeb stores test results in the XML format in the Logs subfolder of your project folder.

In LoadUIWeb Pro logs can be exported to different formats (http://loaduiweb.org/docs/testing/results/working/exporting-test-results.html)



> does loaduiweb have a script/programming language format of the scenarios?

No, all available functionality in LoadUIWeb is exposed through the UI only.