WebLOAD Load Testing Tool Tutorial

This post is a WebLOAD Review, which is a powerful yet easy-to-use Load testing tool. This is a quick review to evaluate some of the tool’s most important features.

WebLOAD is a load-testing tool that’s been around for quite a few years. The current version is 10.3. I feel now is a good time to inspect what it offers. 

This review covers the following topics:

• Its key features from basic recording through the support of web technologies.
• Reporting capabilities.
• Advanced features, such as integration with other tools and software processes.

WebLOAD Load Testing Tool Review

WebLOAD is provided by RadView, a company that has been around for over 20 years and positions itself as an alternative to LoadRunner.

The name WebLOAD can be misleading. While it provides extensive features for load-testing web systems, it can also test different enterprise systems (Oracle, SAP, and others).

You can download a fully functional WebLOAD Free Edition with 50 virtual users here => Download here.

Some Important Features:

• Simple Test Creation: Create and view your load script quickly with record and playback options.
• Native JavaScript scripting language for more complex business logic and usage of function libraries.
• Automatic correlation of dynamic values.
• Support of Selenium and Perfecto Mobile to measure real-user experience.
• Load generation can be done on-premises and in the cloud using the built-in AWS integration.
• Integrating with APM tools helps identify the root cause of bottlenecks.
• The Jenkins plugin incorporates load testing into continuous delivery processes.
• Powerful analysis tools and customizable reports.
• Web dashboard for real-time viewing of test results.

Building a Load Test

Installing WebLOAD takes only about 5 minutes, after which I can quickly record a simple test in the IDE, run it in the console with a few virtual clients, and then view the results using its analytics.

WebLOAD uses a proxy-based recorder, so there was no need for any configuration. It recorded all my web activities – both HTTP and HTTPS. The recorder skips web page resources (such as CSS, JS, images, etc) since WebLOAD identifies these during the playback and brings them automatically.

Changing the page saved you the trouble of manually editing the script or having to re-record it to include the changed resources.

While web applications are the most common targets for load testing, I was also looking for a TCP recorder, but could not find any.

The IDE window provides several views for your load test, including a Page View that lets you view the actual pages browsed and HTML and HTTP Headers views for drilling down.

An important view for me was the JavaScript View. It enables examining (and enhancing) the logic of your test. WebLOAD uses JavaScript as its native scripting language.

Using JavaScript for Logic Enhancements

With JavaScript, script editing and enhancements are pretty straightforward. I did not create a realistic load scenario, but just wanted to examine some capabilities.

I used the script to log in to the Tomcat server (via standard http get requests), then checked if Jenkins is installed (via the DOM). If Jenkins is installed, the script will loop over the result and check if it has been started. If it has not been started yet, a Java component is used to send an SMS.

Notice that when creating a standard Java Object you should use the full packages path before the class name – for example:

var myString = java.lang.String().

When you create your java object, add “Packages.” before the path of the full packages to your class – for example:

var myVar = Packages.package1.package2.MyClass()

For WebLOAD to recognize your jar file, just put it in the C:\ProgramData\RadView\WebLOAD\extensions\java directory and WebLOAD will automatically add the jar to the classpath. You do not need to update any classpath yourself.

Enhancing Script via IDE Configuration

The IDE includes many other features for enhancing and adding logic to your script.

HTTP and Client Configuration: When switching to enhance my test script, I found rich HTTP configuration options for browsers, caching, cookies, connection speed, etc.

I wondered why I needed to configure these parameters twice: in the IDE and for the console before executing. It seems during execution I can give different parameters to different virtual users.

Parameterization and Validation: WebLOAD offers an enhanced parameterization feature with many algorithms to consume the parameters–for example, global, unique, random, and sequential, as well as response validation (simply right-click an element and select ‘Response Validation’ to enter a validation point without scripting).

Building Blocks: The part I probably liked the most was the ability to drag-and-drop building blocks such as an FTP call or an open/close transaction directly into the script, where a window opens with parameters to be filled in.

Automatic Correlation

Correlation is an important phase for enabling a recorded script to be executed dynamically with many virtual clients. WebLOAD correlation is effective and automatically prompts the relevant dynamic values. Once it is configured, I can continue to record and execute without the need to correlate again.

Consider that regardless of the tool you use, an automatic correlation will never be 100% accurate and will always require your intervention and editing.

Selenium Integration

Measuring the real user experience during load testing is an important additional feature to the protocols stress testing. By activating a real browser or a mobile device, you can measure its behavior during load testing and examine the real user experience while your system is under load.

WebLOAD does a pretty amazing job with its Selenium integration using a plug-in. You record a script in Selenium and then export it to WebLOAD.

During the execution phase, WebLOAD measures performance statistics that are collected by the browser. This helps you see side by side, for example, the load size, the hits per second of the test, and the real user experience on the same graph. I could also dive into more detailed browser stats like rendering time, server processing time, etc.

Mobile Load Testing

WebLOAD has a neat integration with Perfecto Mobile, where it activates a real mobile device from PerfectoMobile’s cloud. The wizard will help you select the specific device and location that will be used during the test.

During load test execution, WebLOAD activates the mobile machine and displays performance information directly from the device. The information included the mobile activity I had done, and the machine’s resources information such as CPU, memory, and even battery usage.

Enterprise Apps and Protocols

WebLOAD seems to provide good support for a wide range of web-related protocols like HTTP/S, HTML5, web services, Rest API, AJAX, and push technologies, as well as FTP, SMTP, TCP, DBs, etc. For enterprise applications, there is built-in support for SAP, Oracle apps, Ellucian, and a few more.

As mentioned earlier, you can also work with Java objects to test any specific usage, such as a homegrown application.

Executing Tests and Generating Load

WebLOAD provides a variety of interesting test execution features. First, you can generate load from both on-premises machines and from the cloud. You can use WebLOAD’s integration with Amazon EC2 or you can handle it yourself. WebLOAD will start and stop the machines for you using your Amazon credentials.

An interesting feature is ‘Goal Oriented Testing’. For example, you can define your goal to be a 2-second maximum response time. If you have to gradually increase the load, WebLOAD will automatically increase the number of virtual users until your 2-second response time goal is met. You can learn when your system reaches the response time limit you have set.

During load testing, your goal is not only to detect bottlenecks but also to identify their root cause. Typically, the problems you’ll detect will be related to the server side. It can be a database issue, server CPU utilization, memory size, or others.

To this effect, WebLOAD provides an out-of-the-box Performance Measurement Manager that lets you grab statistics from web servers, application servers, DB servers, SNMP, etc.

Analysis and Reporting

I like the Analytics report templates, which you can use right away. Analytics include a rules engine that automatically marks the problematic area in a report so you know where you need to drill down.

Besides using the rich number of built-in reports and graphs, I can also create my reports starting from scratch.

Another feature is session comparison. This lets you overlay and compare several scenarios running side by side so that you can compare system behavior under different conditions.

The Session Comparison report lets your view transaction response times of two different runs side by side

Web Dashboard

The Web Dashboard is a web server that provides web access to the test results. It lets you see the test results via a web browser while the tests are running. The Web Dashboard does not compete with HP Performance Center but rather provides an important functionality at no additional charge.

The Web Dashboard is very flexible to customize your view, and your charts, add measurements, etc. However, it took me some time to discover how to customize it exactly. A better job could be done with documentation/help.

Team members can define their views and views can be shared by using a simple share link option. You can easily find an issue and send the specific view to your DBA or your boss so they can see what you see.

Comparing tests was also easy. I just chose 2 tests and they were presented on the same set of graphs. It took me some time to understand the relative and absolute time on the upper options.

If you want to see the same tests and easily compare them, use relative time. Otherwise, the absolute time presents them using the real-time they were executed.

APM and Jenkins Integration

I could not check the advanced features, but WebLOAD has built-in integrations with Application Performance Management (APM) tools such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and NewRelic.

According to the documentation, you can view a problem in your WebLOAD test results, and then instantly switch to the APM tool to dig deep and find the root cause in the server-side events.

Another interesting feature is the Jenkins plug-in. This lets you add ‘WebLOAD’ steps to Jenkins so that you can run your load tests automatically from Jenkins workflow and then act upon the results of the tests.

Conclusion

WebLOAD tool is worth looking at, especially if you need the power of scripting to handle more challenging load-testing environments. It offers breadth and depth of features and on the whole, should be closely examined if looking for an alternative to LoadRunner.

Suggested reading =>> How to run URL-based Load Test With WebLOAD

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