My web application is almost exclusively AJAX-based, where data is fetched via a web service and returned via JSON.
I'm using WAST to stress test, but I'm sure there are better tools out there for this job.
Does anyone have recommendations?
Thanks
Ryan recommended Selenium, which isn't traditionally a load testing tool. He is correct that of all the recommendations so far, it's by far the best at handling AJAX. The reason is that Selenium drives a real web browser and can be programmed to "wait" for AJAX events to occur, such as a "DIV" element popping up or disappearing.
The problem with that approach is that browsers take up a ton of resources. You can't run more than 2-3 on a single server - far fewer than you can run VUs with JMeter. That's why I created BrowserMob, a service perfect for AJAX load testing.
As the co-creator of Selenium RC, I felt that using Cloud Computing was a great way to "have your cake and eat it too". Using hundreds of computers in the cloud, you can generate large volumes of load from real browsers, which handle AJAX very easy. To learn more on this subject, check an article I wrote for Ajaxian here.
The ab Apache Benchmarking tool that can send custom headers, take a file argument for post data, and write results to a CSV for you. Good if you're command-line savvy. man ab for more info.
Take a look at loadrunner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoadRunner
Take a look at LoadBooster(https://www.loadbooster.com). LoadBooster utilizes headless scriptable browser PhantomJS to test web sites. Phantomjs will parse and render every page, execute the client-side script. The headless browser approach is easier to write test scenarios to support complex AJAX heavy Web 2.0 app，browser navigation, mouse click and keystrokes into the browser or wait until an element exists in DOM.
Disclaimer: I work for LoadBooster.
Take a look at WebLOAD - I've used it in AJAX heavy site.
Related
Most of the tools out there do not seem to be interpreting jQuery / Javascript code that is loaded on the page that I want to test. This is however important because that code will, in turn initiate a number of calls to other endpoints in my webapp which adds up to load in a real life scenario.
I've looked at JMeter already and am a bit reluctant to give it a try as the landing page mentions explicitly that it does not do Javascript interpreting at all.
What would be some recommendation of tools that can provide a more accurate measurement of load testing by including Javascript code?
None of the load testing tools really executes JavaScript, they all act on protocol level and JavaScript is being executed by browser.
There are 3 options how you could proceed if you want 100% realistic testing:
HP LoadRunner has TrueClient protocol which is basically headless browser with JavaScript capabilities.
JMeter with WebDriver Sampler plugin - the way to kick off real browsers from JMeter test
Selenium Grid (or other way to kick off several Selenium instances at once)
All 3 above options are very resource intensive, you will required at least 1 CPU core and a couple of gigabytes or RAM for a single browser instance so I would recommend a little bit different approach. JMeter cannot execute JavaScript, but it can execute JavaScript-driven HTTP Requests so create main load using JMeter (or equivalent) and while the load test is running use Selenium to automatically check real browsing experience or YSLow to do the same manually.
Load testing tools doesn't execute JavaScript.
You know which endpoints your JavaScript code is using so just add these endpoints to your JMeter scenario.
The thick client problem has been around since the early 1990s with traditional thick client-server applications. In fact, the earliest commercial tools were all driving full clients on X Windows before adding API level virtual user capabilities. On the commercial front this ability to drive full, thick clients is still expressed as GUI virtual users (Mercury/HP/Microfocus LoadRunner, Segue/Borland/Microfocus Silk Performer, Rational/IBM Performance Tester) allowing you to measure the weight between API and user level if needed.
Here is the thing, for a given business process and data set the end client is predictable in its behavior, and in the requests that it makes to the servers that are feeding it data. There may be a few odd conditions where you need to reproduce an algorithm from JavaScript to C (or even run it directly in some tools) for branching on a type of API/HTTP request, but these are not numerous.
I'm trying to build a simulator that simulates hundreds of users on a web application.
I'm usually using Microsoft Load Simulator and WebTests.
If the webpage has some complexity I'm using WebTest plugins to adjust it correctly.
Now, I have a web page that does tons of ajax requests per url I visit, the ajax requests are based on complex calculations done in the browser.
If I'll just browse to the url and record all the traffic, even after I'll make some dynamic parameters I still won't be able to simulate it correctly since there may be different requests that could be sent based on the server previous responses.
If I'll build a webtest that simulates it correctly it will require a lot of webtest plugins and will be impossible to maintaince since the site will probably change each few weeks.
I thought about using selenium but if I'll use it I will need far too much hardware resources to run hundreds of users.
I came up with the idea of using a headless browser such as PhantomJs, SimpleBrowser, HtmlUnit and etc.
Both SimpleBrowser and HtmlUnit does not support executing javascript/AJAX which makes them useless for me.
I tried using PhantomJs but I had a problem with running multiple users in parallel since the localStorage is the same for all so it keeps the same session for all so I can't simulate different users in parallel.
Does anyone had any experience with loadtesting complex ajax web applications?
I will Love you for eternity if you would help me with this issue.
P.S
I'm usually coding in C# but I'm open for new languages\technologies.
Using Selenium for performance testing is not logical. I recommend you to use Locust for real performance testing. For getting and using a dynamic data you can check the this answer. You need to write simple Python script for simulating users.
I am investigating www.loadbooster.com that can import a Selenium script and run headless borwoser with PhantomJS to run the script as a load test.
It is still work in progress for me, so I cant comment on how good it is, but you could investigate it.
I am not able to find out anywhere that how can we do performance test manually.
Please help me out for this query.
Thanks!
Maybe you are looking for JMeter or a similar tool.
What browser? Most of the current browsers support the W3C Navigation Timing spec and expose performance data directly on the DOM. You can access it from the console, from javascript on your pages or from browser extensions that display the information.
If you want more detail like a resource load waterfall then you can usually access that directly from the dev tools provided by the various browsers.
One thing you will want to be really careful of is to make sure you do your testing in a configuration that is similar to the users. If you are running a server locally and testing from a browser on the same machine or even the same network then your performance data will be pretty worthless (unless it's an intranet app).
you can perform manual testing (Performance testing) for any webpage by optimizing your css, Javascript and images ( size).
I think JMeter is a best tool for same to check webpage testing if you want add some scripting you can also add.
Also you can check Yslow addons of firefox.This addons give you filter data to optimized your page perfromes.
Also there are some online link available.
How can we run performance testing manually for any webpage?
You can simple use GTMatrix tool which will response of your site Performaces overall in detail.
The best way to go for Performance Testing without any tool is to provide a Standard loading time for each page as per one's experience knowledge. Else request the client to provide an ideal time for each page. Against which the loading time can be verified. But in case of multiple user simultaneously JMeter is the best hands on Approach available. Its Open source. Easy to understand. And you get reports too.
But of course there are multiple factors that would hinder the Performance. They are :
Your network speed
The Server speed on which your application is hosted
The number of Simultaneous users using
The Heavy images in pages
Last but not the least unnecessary links, codes, in short memory consumption in Code, could be loops not required. All the gifts from Developer Teams !!
I want to test the performance of my website. I have hosted it on godaddy and I want to see how it performance when 100s of users are trying to access it.
Is their a way to do the above? Is their a script that can be developed to send multiple page request?
Thanks
Consider trying Jmeter or siege.
Apache Bench is commonly used for doing load testing (which is pretty much what you are describing). There are also a bunch of services that will do it for you (some free, most with varying costs).
You could simply script curl or whet to beat on it in parallel but just throwing load at it isn't terribly useful if you don't also track how the site performs under the load (which is where the other tools come in).
One thing to watch out for is if you test just the base page/application or if you use a real browser engine to test the full page (including images and static resources).
We are using watir and integrated with VS 2008 using ruby in steel and we have automated our web application and it awsome.
Is there way to use the same script to do the performance testing or is there any better tool.
It's hard to tell if you want something that analyzes the performance of your website (ie: profiler) or a load/stress testing tool. I'm going to assume you want a load testing tool and not a profiler, given that you're talking about script reuse.
All load testing tools, except for one (disclaimer: my company is that one), work by recording HTTP traffic and then replaying it. The script is very different from a functional testing script like one you'd have for Watir.
You can either record the HTTP traffic generated by your Watir script or try to run your functional tests directly.
If you're also using FireWatir, you can use Firebug, which is an excellent web developer tool and shows you the recorded traffic for each page. If you're using IE primarily, check out HttpWatch. It's commercial, but provides great network timings for IE and can export to various data formats. Alternatively, many load testing tools provide a proxy that can record traffic and generate a load script for you.
Once you've got the network data, you can likely quickly turn it in to a script that Pylot, Grinder, JMeter, etc can understand. The problem with this method is that you need to re-record your script whenever any part of the site or the test changes. And if your app is anything more than basic HTML (ie: Ajax, .NET viewstate, etc) then you may have to use some advanced parts of your load testing tool. See my article on ajax load testing for more info.
Shameless plug: if you were using Selenium (or were willing to convert a couple Watir scripts to Selenium scripts), which is another open source functional testing tool, you could use BrowserMob, which provides a load testing service that uses real browsers to play back the load and functional test scripts (Selenium) to drive them. It uses a lot more resources, but thanks to cloud computing the price point is still very low.
There's rawk that you could run over the log files. This gives a pretty comprehensive summary of what's taking so long.
Alternatively there's NewRelic which provides monitoring for your rails app and gives you a detailed breakdown of what every request is doing.
And finally there's FiveRuns which does things very similar to NewRelic.
Have a look at LoadWise, you could reuse existing functional test scripts for performance testing.
With the same load test scripts without change, You can either preview it in Firefox (via FireWatir) or hit your web sites with X number of virtual users (via Celerity).
http://testwisely.com/en/loadwise
dIf you are truely talking just 'performance' then you could alter the scripts to start capturing and recording the page load tines. Any time you so some action that causes a page to load (like navigating to a link) Watir returns the time to load the page.
You just need to have the scripts implement some kind of simple logging method to be able to record the time to load each page, and then alter the scripts so that it return value is captured ala
loadtime = browser.goto(someurl)
perflogger(someurl, loadtime)