| Oracle® Load Testing Load Testing User's Guide Version 9.10 for Microsoft Windows (32-Bit) Part Number E15484-03 |
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View PDF |
| Oracle® Load Testing Load Testing User's Guide Version 9.10 for Microsoft Windows (32-Bit) Part Number E15484-03 |
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View PDF |
The power of the Internet is that you can make your new Web application available to thousands of users instantaneously. That's also the scary part. Fortune 1000 companies are rapidly exploiting Web technology for business-critical commerce and enterprise applications. Scalability is one of the top concerns most often cited by IT managers as they prepare to deploy new Internet and Intranet applications for their companies. With the myriad of technologies and platforms to choose from, it's no wonder that the biggest concern many developers have is "will the application scale?"
Since much of the technology is new, there is significant risk with any Web project that the application will not perform adequately under real-life conditions. The only way to mitigate this risk is by emulating the load of hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users prior to the application going live.
Oracle Load Testing provides the easiest and most accurate way to test the scalability of your e-commerce and e-business applications. Oracle Load Testing emulates thousands of "virtual users" accessing your site simultaneously, and measures the effect of the load on application performance.
TrueLoad technology ensures that your tests closely correlate with real user-load so you can confidently use Oracle Load Testing results to help make key decisions about your system's architecture, tuning, and hosting alternatives.
Oracle Load Testing is the load and scalability testing component of the Oracle Application Testing Suite. Oracle Load Testing requires no programming and is operated using an intuitive graphical user interface and Visual Scripts. Oracle Load Testing uses the Visual Scripts you develop using Oracle Functional Testing, which have verification capabilities built in, to emulate the Virtual Users for load testing.
Oracle Load Testing offers the following advantages for load testing Web-based applications:
Accurately emulates real user interactions and tests for correct responses.
Requires no programming and re-uses your functional and regression tests scripts with no modifications.
Enables you to vary load conditions on-the-fly to try "what-if" scenarios, and to create comprehensive reports and graphs with the touch of a button.
Allows you to access Oracle Load Testing from any networked machine using a web browser.
Allows multiple users to collaborate during testing by connecting to the same in progress test session to view and analyze results.
Most Web load testing tools today are simply HTTP recorders that record the low-level traffic between client browser and web server and then play back many copies of the recording simultaneously. The problem is that most web applications are dynamic, that is, the Web pages change slightly with every request to reflect such things as session IDs and dynamic content. This means that the recording you make now will be useless in five minutes.
In addition, it's very difficult to know if the server is responding correctly. For example, your server could be sending the message "Server Busy" to many users and most load testing tools will never notice the difference.
Oracle Load Testing offers several advantages over current load testing tools for Web-based applications, as follows:
TrueLoad Technology
Reuse of existing Visual Scripts
User-defined Virtual User Profiles
Single Point of Control with Distributed Agents
Data-Driven Load Testing
Real Time Reports and Graphs
Real Time Server-Side Statistics Monitoring
Optimized for Popular IDEs
Web-based Access
Collaborative Testing
Oracle Load Testing uses innovative TrueLoad technology that closely emulates the traffic from real Web users using real Web browsers. TrueLoad includes the following unique technologies:
Object-Oriented Recording - Unlike HTTP-based tools, Oracle Load Testing records the actual objects used by the Web browser to render a page. These objects are represented graphically in Oracle Load Testing Visual Scripts. The Visual Scripts that are used for load testing are richer in detail than what is captured with HTTP recorders, and are much easier to understand, maintain, and debug. As the application-under-test evolves during the development cycle, it is very easy to make incremental updates to the Visual Script.
Automatic Response Verification - Oracle Load Testing automatically checks for the accuracy of each of the pages returned by the server. If the pages match what is defined in the Visual Script, the test will proceed without errors. If pages are returned that do not match the recorded baseline script, then an error will be flagged.
Concurrent Object Requests - Like IE and Netscape, each Oracle Load Testing Virtual User makes concurrent requests to the server using the multi-threading capabilities of the operating system; i.e. one thread gets the page, another gets images, etc. The result is that the intensity of hits generated on the back-end servers is identical to that of a real browser.
Automatic Session Management - Oracle Load Testing automatically recognizes and handles the session variables for popular development environments such as Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET, Weblogic, WebSphere, NetDynamics, ColdFusion, and WebObjects.
TrueLoad technology used in Oracle Load Testing offers the most accurate load simulation available, and produces results that closely correlate with real-life usage.
Oracle Load Testing uses the same Visual Scripts created for functional testing with Oracle Functional Testing to emulate hundreds or thousands of "virtual users." The Oracle Load Testing Build Scenarios tab lets you define any number of custom load scenarios by simply pointing and clicking on the names of the pre recorded Visual Scripts and then specifying how many virtual users of each type you wish to run.
You can change the number and type of users on-the-fly to try "what-if" scenarios as you vary the loading conditions or application settings. While running, any virtual user can be "expanded" to be able to view the actual pages seen by virtual users to aid in debugging.
Oracle Load Testing also lets you combine multiple Visual Scripts as part of a single virtual user "profile." Within these profiles, you can specify Visual Scripts to use as prolog, run, epilog, and error scripts.
User-defined profiles can also include synchronization points to create realistic multi-user situations.
Virtual users can be simulated by a single server or distributed among multiple servers located anywhere on a LAN or WAN. The Oracle Load Testing controller can run virtual user "agents" on distributed client stations from a single location.
Using the Oracle Load Testing Build Scenarios and Set Up Autopilot tabs, you can define any number of custom load scenarios by simply pointing and clicking on the names of the pre-recorded Visual Scripts. Oracle Load Testing scenarios define which virtual user profiles each agent will run on which workstation, specifies how many virtual users of each type to run, and how virtual users should ramp up.
Oracle Load Testing easily supports data-driven testing to emulate realistic scenarios in which many different users are accessing different database records simultaneously. The Oracle Functional Testing Data Bank Wizard lets you re-use a single recorded script many times with a different data set for each virtual user. For example, you can use different usernames, passwords, account balances, etc. for different virtual users. Data is automatically read in from an external Data Bank and overlaid onto each virtual user.
The graphing capability in Oracle Load Testing lets you see the results of your Oracle Load Testing tests in real time. Performance data can be accumulated at varying levels of granularity including profiles, scripts, groups of pages, individual pages, and objects on pages. Graphs and reports include response time, error rates, number of users, and statistics such as hits-per-second, and pages-per-second, etc.
In addition, Oracle Load Testing provides for post-run analysis using a comprehensive set of graphs and reports. You can also export data for use in external programs such as Microsoft Excel for further analysis.
The server-statistics monitoring capability of Oracle Load Testing ServerStats lets you monitor a variety of server-side application, database, system, and Web server statistics. You can configure Oracle Load Testing ServerStats to display real-time performance statistics for the various hosts and services available from the server such as, percentage of CPU usage, memory usage, Web server statistics, etc.
You can monitor specific counters in real time while running a load test. Server statistics can also be saved to the Oracle Load Testing database for later analysis.
Oracle Load Testing is optimized for a number of popular Web development environments including NetDynamics, WebObjects, Cold Fusion and Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET, Weblogic, and WebSphere. These tools use variable session ID's and SSL, which pose problems for other load tools. Oracle Load Testing handles these environment features automatically.
Load and performance testing should not just be a one-time event prior to deployment. Instead it should become an integral part of the process of designing, building, and maintaining Web applications. Load testing can and should be used to validate the system architecture in the early stages of development, to identify bottlenecks and to benchmark the application during its development, and to fine-tune the application for optimal performance prior to deployment. As the application and system infrastructure are modified over time, the standard set of performance benchmark tests developed should be re-run to ensure that performance has not been adversely affected.
Even after the application is deployed, application performance should be continuously monitored to identify slowdowns and performance degradation before users experience problems.
Oracle Load Testing is one component of the Oracle Application Testing Suite, an integrated solution for testing e-Business applications. Designed to deliver an immediate improvement in the quality of your software by offering repeatable, measurable results, the Oracle Application Testing Suite helps you keep pace with the accelerated Web application development cycle.
Oracle Application Testing Suite is fully integrated and is the first Web testing solution to leverage a single set of test assets from development through deployment, ensuring consistency in testing throughout the application life cycle and maximizing the return on investment for automated testing of your Web applications.
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